Fifteen stories, fifteen pieces of life against the background of the brutal war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. On the border between real and imaginary, with shades of surrealism and magical realism, war scenes alternate, dreams of a peaceful and serene world, of distant journeys, mythological references, analogies with other countries and peoples... At the center of the narrative is the man with his fragile identity, with the unhealed inner scars, with the sense of personal apocalypse.
The EU Prize for Literature-winning writer Faruk Šehić, who counts himself among the so-called overrun generation, continues to tell stories about the trauma of war and the horror of peace in his volume of prose. Time is at the center of his texts – as an element, a dimension, a means, and an instrument.
Here, the ticking of clocks, both real and unreal, links the poetic dystopias and war scenes into a fantastic-futuristic unity.
This project has been funded with support from the Creative Europe Programme of the European Commission.
Faruk Šehić was born in 1970 in Bihać, in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Until the outbreak of war in 1992, he studied veterinary medicine in Zagreb. However, the then 22-year-old joined the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which he led a unit of 130 men. After the war he studied literature and has gone on to create his own literary works.
His second book Hit depot (2003) was the absolutely literary bestseller in Bosnia despite that was a poetry book. In this book he made a sketch of a several main topic of his later works such as postwar life on the edge of society. His poems are about local (and global) feeling of capitalistic way of life mixed with desperate post-war life in ruins; remains of destroyed civil society in Sarajevo and Bosnia. Literary critics have hailed Šehić as the voice of the mangled generation of writers born in 1970s Yugoslavia.
His collection of short stories Under Pressure (Pod pritiskom, 2004) was awarded the Zoro Verlag Prize. His debut novel Quiet Flows the Una (Knjiga o Uni, 2011) received the Meša Selimović prize for the best novel published in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia in 2011 and the EU Prize for Literature in 2013. His most recent poetry book is a collection entitled My Rivers (Moje rijeke, 2014) for whom he received Risto Ratković Award for the best poetry book in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia in 2014, and Annual award from Association of Writers of Bosnia and Herzegovina. For his book of selected poems in Italian and Bosnian language Ritorno alla natura / Povratak prirodi he received XXXI Premio Letterario Camaiore - Francesco Belluomini 2019 (Premio Internazionale).
His last published book is a short novel Greta (2021). His books are translated into Ukrainian, German, Albanian, French, Turkish, English, Bulgarian, Spanish, Dutch, Macedonian, Polish, Slovenian, Italian, Arabic, Romanian and Hungarian language. Šehić lives in Sarajevo and works as a columnist and journalist in respected political magazine BH Dani.
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