essay

Dubravka Ugrešić: The Spirit of the Kakanian Province

"While I was leafing through a few Croatian Kakanian novels (which I'd last cracked in high school), I felt I was working not with literary texts but genes. It was like discovering something we have always known but failed to attend to, like discovering a birthmark exactly where it was on our parents, children, grandchildren. At the same time, the literary critic in me grumbled while reading the ongoing episodes of these provincial literary soap operas, which have been going on for a century."

Dubravka Ugrešić has written numerous novels and collections of essays, the most recent being Europe in Sepia (2013) and Karaoke Culture (2011). Ugrešić’s works have been translated into over twenty languages and she is the recipient of several prestigious literary awards including the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1998), a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize (2009), the Jean Amery Essay Prize for her essay work as a whole (2012), and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2016). She has taught in many American and European universities including Harvard, UCLA, Columbia and the Free University of Berlin and holds a degree in Comparative and Russian Literature. She lives in Amsterdam.

Her essay "The spirit of the Kakanian province", from her book Karaoke Culture, you can read here