It is our pleasure to present the very best of our authors featuring in our Foreign Rights Catalogue on the Web (still in the stage of development). You will be able to find presentations in English of their works and a sample translation of the text.
If you are interested in receiving any information about one of our titles, send us an e-mail and we will gladly reply as quickly as possible.
The Palisander Guitar follows the story of five women who are connected by a magical guitar made of palisander wood. The destiny of each woman is unravelled as we follow the guitar from the seed to tree, crafting of the guitar and finally playing it on the stage. Although these women are temporally and spatially remote from each other, their stories are intertwined. Asha belongs to a tribe of travellers that are expelled from the community, Ruza is a wife of a woodcutter who decides to enter the forbidden forest in order to save her family, Sirotica lives with a guitar builder who wants to use palisander guitar as a dowry to marry her, Gabrijela is a muse to artists in a passionate relationship with a composer, Petra is a famous guitar player who gets pregnant and has to decide whether to keep the baby or not. This is a story about motherhood, nature and birthing of an art piece.
Kristina Gavran writes short stories, novels and theatre plays. Her play ‘Ready’ was awarded first prize Marin Drzic by Croatian Ministry of Culture and has premiered in z/k/m theatre in Zagreb. She also writes plays for children; ‘Corruptivitis in the Mousetown’, ‘The Boy who Sought a Kite’, ‘Sonata for the Rubbish bin’ won awards and were produced in Croatian theatres and by Croatian National Radio.
Disput published Kristina’s first book in 2016; Rain in India, Summer in Berlin collects short stories around the theme of travelling and migration. The Palisander Guitar was her first novel, published in 2018; it was in the finals of the t-portal award and got prestigious ‘Mirko Kovac’ award.
Kristina lives in England; she is a doctoral researcher at the University of Loughborough, exploring the true-life storytelling performance. Her first play written in English was ‘Pepper and Honey’ produced by Notnow Collective in 2019 and supported by Arts Council England. The show is successfully touring around the UK from London, to Edinburgh and Birmingham.
Mihaela Gašpar is without doubt the jewel in Disput’s crown of Croatian authors. She has already showcased her exceptional literary talent in four novels and one collection of short stories which are part of our publication catalogue. O čajnicima i ženama (On Teapots and Women) is a typical blend of the emotional and the rational from Mihaela Gašpar’s workshop, a story of a family and the women who make every effort to belong to it and to escape from it at the same time, a story of frustration and guilt, turning, as it were, the essence of life into beautiful literature.
She is the author of the novels No Sudden Joys, Please (Aora, 2010), Mitochondrial Eve (Matica hrvatska Osijek, 2013; second edition: Disput, 2015), On Teapots and Women (Disput, 2016), Slow Landslide (Disput, 2017) and Disquiet (Disput, 2019), and of the collection of short stories A Candy, Tobacco, a Razor (Disput, 2013).
In addition to positive critical reviews of all her prose works, in 2010 she won 2nd prize at the “Zlatko Tomičić” short story contest of Karlovac Literary Circle. In 2011, she took part in the Montenegrin contest “Vranac” for best stories of the region and was included in the anthology Outside of the Corridor. Best Stories in 2011. The manuscript of Mitochondrial Eve won the contest of the Osijek branch of Matica hrvatska for best prose manuscript in 2012. The collection of short stories A Candy, Tobacco, a Razor was shortlisted for the Ksaver Šandor Gjalski award in 2013, while the novel On Teapots and Women made it to the finals for the Fran Galović award in 2017. In 2018, the novel Slow Landslide was nominated for the Meša Selimović award.