Slavenka Drakulic
Encyclopedia
Slavenka Drakulić is a noted Croatia
n writer and publicist who currently lives in Sweden
.
Slavenka Drakulić was born in Rijeka
, PR Croatia, on July 4, 1949. She graduated in comparative literature
and sociology
from the University in Zagreb in 1976. From 1982 to 1992 she was a staff writer for the Start bi-weekly newspaper and news weekly Danas (both in Zagreb
), writing mainly on feminist issues.
article (Slaven Letica
, a known sociologist, former advisor to President Franjo Tudjman and writer, subsequently admitted to being its author) accused five Croatian female writers, Drakulić included, of being "witches" and of "raping" Croatia. According to Letica, these writers failed to take a definitive stance against rape as a planned military tactic by Bosnian Serb forces against Croats, and rather treated it in feminist fashion, as crimes of "unidentified males" against women. Soon after the publication, Drakulić started to receive telephone threats; her property was also vandalized. Finding little or no support from her erstwhile friends and colleagues, she decided to leave Croatia.
Drakulić has written for various newspapers and magazines in many different languages, including The Nation, La Stampa
, Dagens Nyheter
, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
, Eurozine
, and Politiken
.
Her noted recent works relate to the Yugoslav wars
. As If I Am Not There is about crimes against women in the Bosnian War, while They Would Never Hurt a Fly is a book in which she also analyzed her experience overseeing the proceedings and the inmates of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
at The Hague
. Both books touch on the same issues that caused her wartime emigration from the home country. She also wrote "How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed" which is the non-fiction account of Drakulic's life under communism.
Her 2008 novel, "Frida's bed", is based on a biography of a Mexican painter Frida Kahlo
.
Her latest book of essays "A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism: Fables from a Mouse, a Parrot, a Bear, a Cat, a Mole, a Pig, a Dog, & a Raven" was just published in the US by Penguin.
Drakulić currently lives in Stockholm
and Zagreb
.
Croatia
Croatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...
n writer and publicist who currently lives in Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
.
Slavenka Drakulić was born in Rijeka
Rijeka
Rijeka is the principal seaport and the third largest city in Croatia . It is located on Kvarner Bay, an inlet of the Adriatic Sea and has a population of 128,735 inhabitants...
, PR Croatia, on July 4, 1949. She graduated in comparative literature
Comparative literature
Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the literature of two or more different linguistic, cultural or national groups...
and sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
from the University in Zagreb in 1976. From 1982 to 1992 she was a staff writer for the Start bi-weekly newspaper and news weekly Danas (both in Zagreb
Zagreb
Zagreb is the capital and the largest city of the Republic of Croatia. It is in the northwest of the country, along the Sava river, at the southern slopes of the Medvednica mountain. Zagreb lies at an elevation of approximately above sea level. According to the last official census, Zagreb's city...
), writing mainly on feminist issues.
Biography
Drakulić temporarily left Croatia for Sweden in the early 1990s for political reasons, after having been declared insufficiently patriotic by several important albeit jingoistic newspapers. A notorious unsigned 1992 GlobusGlobus (weekly)
Globus is a Croatian weekly news magazine published in Zagreb.The magazine was started in 1990, having some of its first issues published during the Croatian War of Independence. Originally devised as tabloid, it never took an openly chauvinist approach of Slobodni tjednik and always tried to give...
article (Slaven Letica
Slaven Letica
Slaven Letica is a Croatian author, economist, commentator and politician.Native of Podgora, Letica graduated from the University of Zagreb Faculty of Economics....
, a known sociologist, former advisor to President Franjo Tudjman and writer, subsequently admitted to being its author) accused five Croatian female writers, Drakulić included, of being "witches" and of "raping" Croatia. According to Letica, these writers failed to take a definitive stance against rape as a planned military tactic by Bosnian Serb forces against Croats, and rather treated it in feminist fashion, as crimes of "unidentified males" against women. Soon after the publication, Drakulić started to receive telephone threats; her property was also vandalized. Finding little or no support from her erstwhile friends and colleagues, she decided to leave Croatia.
Drakulić has written for various newspapers and magazines in many different languages, including The Nation, La Stampa
La Stampa
La Stampa is one of the best-known, most influential and most widely sold Italian daily newspapers. Published in Turin, it is distributed in Italy and other European nations. The current owner is the Fiat Group.-History:...
, Dagens Nyheter
Dagens Nyheter
is a daily newspaper in Sweden. It has the largest circulation of Swedish morning newspapers, followed by Göteborgs-Posten and Svenska Dagbladet, and is the only morning newspaper that is distributed to subscribers across the whole country. In 2009 DN had a circulation of 316,000, reaching 881...
, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , short F.A.Z., also known as the FAZ, is a national German newspaper, founded in 1949. It is published daily in Frankfurt am Main. The Sunday edition is the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung .F.A.Z...
, Eurozine
Eurozine
Eurozine is a network of European cultural magazines based in Vienna, linking up more than 70 partner magazines and institutions from 34 European countries...
, and Politiken
Politiken
Politiken is a Danish daily broadsheet newspaper, published by JP/Politikens Hus.The newspaper comes third among Danish newspapers in terms of both number of readers and circulated copies ....
.
Her noted recent works relate to the Yugoslav wars
Yugoslav wars
The Yugoslav Wars were a series of wars, fought throughout the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995. The wars were complex: characterized by bitter ethnic conflicts among the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, mostly between Serbs on the one side and Croats and Bosniaks on the other; but also...
. As If I Am Not There is about crimes against women in the Bosnian War, while They Would Never Hurt a Fly is a book in which she also analyzed her experience overseeing the proceedings and the inmates of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
The International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991, more commonly referred to as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia or ICTY, is a...
at The Hague
The Hague
The Hague is the capital city of the province of South Holland in the Netherlands. With a population of 500,000 inhabitants , it is the third largest city of the Netherlands, after Amsterdam and Rotterdam...
. Both books touch on the same issues that caused her wartime emigration from the home country. She also wrote "How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed" which is the non-fiction account of Drakulic's life under communism.
Her 2008 novel, "Frida's bed", is based on a biography of a Mexican painter Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo de Rivera was a Mexican painter, born in Coyoacán, and perhaps best known for her self-portraits....
.
Her latest book of essays "A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism: Fables from a Mouse, a Parrot, a Bear, a Cat, a Mole, a Pig, a Dog, & a Raven" was just published in the US by Penguin.
Drakulić currently lives in Stockholm
Stockholm
Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...
and Zagreb
Zagreb
Zagreb is the capital and the largest city of the Republic of Croatia. It is in the northwest of the country, along the Sava river, at the southern slopes of the Medvednica mountain. Zagreb lies at an elevation of approximately above sea level. According to the last official census, Zagreb's city...
.
Fiction
- "Holograms Of Fear" Hutchinson, London (19921992 in literatureThe year 1992 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-New books:*Ben Aaronovitch - Transit*Julia Álvarez - How the García Girls Lost Their Accents*Paul Auster - Leviathan*Iain Banks - The Crow Road...
) - "Marble Skin" Hutchinson, London (19931993 in literatureThe year 1993 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Professor Stephen Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time, becomes the longest running book on the bestseller list of The Sunday Times....
) - "The Taste of a Man" Abacus, London (19971997 in literatureThe year 1997 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Tom Clancy signs a book deal with Pearson Custom Publishing and Penguin Putnam Inc. , giving him US$50 million for the world-English rights to two new books . A second agreement gives him another US$25 million for a...
) - "S -a novel about Balkans" (also known as: "As If I Am Not There") (19991999 in literatureThe year 1999 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*June 19 - Stephen King is hit by a Dodge van while taking a walk. He spends the next three weeks hospitalized...
). Made into a movie "As if I am not there", directed by Juanita WilsonJuanita WilsonJuanita Wilson is an Irish director and writer from Dublin. Her short film The Door received an Irish Film and Television Award in 2009 and an Academy Award nomination in 2010...
. - "Frida's Bed" Penguin USA, New York (20082008 in literatureThe year 2008 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*January 1 - In the 2008 New Year Honours, Hanif Kureishi , Jenny Uglow , Peter Vansittart and Debjani Chatterjee are all rewarded for "services to literature".*June 15 - Gore Vidal, asked in a New York Times...
),
Non-fiction
- "Smrtni grijesi feminizma" (19841984 in literatureThe year 1984 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*The book Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is widely read....
) only in Croatian - "How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed", Hutchinson, London (19911991 in literatureThe year 1991 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Douglas Coupland publishes the novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularizing the term Generation X as the name of the generation....
) - "Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of the War", W.W. Norton, New York (19931993 in literatureThe year 1993 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Professor Stephen Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time, becomes the longest running book on the bestseller list of The Sunday Times....
) - "Cafe EuropaCafe EuropaThis article is about the book, for the 2006 Europe Day event see, Café EuropeCafé Europa: Life After Communism is a 1996 book by Slavenka Drakulić, the noted Croatian writer. It talks about the experiences of the peoples of Eastern Europe after the retreat of Communism and the fall of the Iron...
: Life After Communism" Abacus, London (19961996 in literatureThe year 1996 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, is removed from an advanced placement English reading list in Lindale, Texas because it "conflicted with the values of the community."* In the United Kingdom, the first...
) - "They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in the HagueThey Would Never Hurt a FlyThey Would Never Hurt a Fly by Slavenka Drakulić is a 2004 book discussing the personalities of the Hague War Crimes defendants from the former Yugoslavia . Most chapters are personality profiles of an individual war criminal, rather than expositions of hard facts. Most of those discussed are...
" Abacus -TimeWarner, London (20042004 in literatureThe year 2004 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* Canada Reads selects Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Last Crossing to be read across the nation....
) - "Tijelo njenog tijela" (20062006 in literatureThe year 2006 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Literature:*Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun*Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital *Martin Amis - House of Meetings...
) available in Croatian, German and Polish - "Two Underdogs and a cat", Seagull Books . London, NY, Calcutta (20092009 in literatureThe year 2009 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*8 October - Romanian-born German novelist Herta Müller wins the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature....
) - "A GUDED TOUR THROUGH THE MUSEUM OF COMMUNISM –Fables from a Mouse, a Parrot, a Bear, a Cat , a Mole, a Pig, a Dog & a Raven", Penguin, New York, (20112011 in literatureThe year 2011 will involve some significant events and new books.-Events:*Tomas Tranströmer wins the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature.*Jennifer Egan wins the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel A Visit From the Goon Squad.-Literature:*T.C...
)
Articles
- We Are All Albanians 1999
- Bosnian Women Witness 2001
- Crime in the circles of power October 2008
- Slavenka Drakulic Interview 2009
- Articles on Eurozine
- Articles in The Nation
- Articles in The Guardian
- Rape as a Weapon of War 2008
- Slavenka Drakulic and Katha Pollitt in conversation 2011