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.
Fafarikul is a collection of about a hundred short stories, anecdotes and recollections. What they all have in common is the narrator’s willingness to speak without reserve or mercy about the weaknesses, first and foremost her own, but also about the fears, flaws, mistakes and wrong turns which most readers may recognize as their own. At times the literary dimension of the writings cedes prominence to factual narration, while at other times the noting of facts (names, toponyms, dates) is used merely as material for constructing fiction.
Although they are written in first person, the texts included in this collection – be they imbued with humour or with melancholy – focus equally on the author’s “I” and on others. The choice of subject-matter and the psychological axes around which the stories are structured combine the particular and the general, the unique and the repetitive, the individual and the collective.
The accessible, playful and non-criptically written texts are limited by only one imperative: the need to narrate, i.e. to transform the brevity, transience and porosity of events, emotions and human interrelations into stories, thus enabling them to last even when the material of which they were built no longer exists in reality.
Fafarikul can be read as a record of invented recollections, a catalogue of unwritten letters, an archive of torn out inscriptions, an album of sketches for portraits drawn with words. The author and the narrator do not have much in common, but there is one thing which they agree upon: everything that has been written no longer belongs to either of them, but to the reader.
It is she who reads the story that is its master.
Fafarikul has been very well received by literary critics and readers alike, it is the book that was written about and talked about the most in 2020, and it is likely to be a point of reference for many years to come.
Đurđica Čilić was born in 1975 in Livno, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and grew up in Vitez. She is a senior lecturer at the Department for Polish Language and Literature at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Zagreb, and she conducts courses in Polish literature, translating and theory of literature. In 2010 she obtained the doctor’s degree with the thesis entitled “Author Formation in the Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz and Tadeusz Rozewicz”. She writes scientific articles on Polish literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as literary reviews, and she translates from the Polish language, poetry in particular.