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.
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IGOR IVKO
Beginners
In the novel Beginners, the author contrasts the youthful idealism embodied in the famous student protests in the universities across Croatia in 2009. and the later life of these same young rebellious people, now emigrants and unskilled workers in Germany.
The narrator follows two hypersensitive young people, a married couple in their thirties, with non-marketable degrees in philosophy who are – in an unfavourable balance of misery, bitterness and hope – trying to fight for their place under the sun and at the same time remain as mentally stable as possible. As the title somewhat ironically suggests, they want to start from the beginning. Ivko contrasts this situation, set in the narrative present, with another narrative plan, which follows the events of ten years ago. In that second narrative flow, we learn that Marin and Lota met during the student blockade of universities across Croatia, in which they both participated with great enthusiasm and persistent hope that a better world is possible.
Invulnerable place
Invulnerable place, Igor Ivko’s debut collection of stories, is an unusual phenomenon in the Croatian literary scene. It is not often that a younger author enters the story so authoritatively, balancing between motive realism and a deeply existentialist attitude toward the world.
A young man burying his father, workers gone mad from the repetitiveness of office work, from the lies and nonsense of the world, people whose life has just begun and already have to look for it elsewhere, in Germany or Ireland – these are just some of the anti-heroes of the ordinary and every day with whom the reader could easily identify.
Just as Annie Ernaux in her work A Man’s Place was looking for a language to describe the class struggles of the children and youth, Ivko in his Invulnerable place will describe those who at least once in their life thought how life – under the shadow of poverty, shattered illusions and the usual morning meaninglessness of all things – it is not more than the absurdity of existence, its eternal repetition.
Igor Ivko was born in 1986 in Varaždin, North Croatia. He studied philosophy, ethnology and anthropology and completed education in Gestalt therapy. He works as a Gestalt psychotherapist in Varaždin.
So far, he has published a collection of short stories Nepovredivo mjesto (Invulnerable place, 2021), which won the Edo Budiša literature Award in 2022.
KRISTINA GAVRAN
In between
The novel In between follows the migrant experience of a young married couple from Zagreb in the English industrial city of Birmingham in the period from 2011 to 2022. Marko, an incomplete economics student, who leaves to pay off Swiss franc loan, at first works there as a construction worker, and Sandra soon joins him, carried away by dreams of drinking tea and the English lifestyle, but the reality is completely different because, as a teacher, she cannot find job in her field, so she accepts a position at the bus station counter. The novel follows their emotional and quite practical life between Birmingham and Zagreb, the dilemma between staying there and returning home, their maturation followed by breaking prejudices against foreigners and fitting into the British way of life, but also by the increasingly strong realization that Zagreb is becoming a foreign city to them. In this splitting and dissolution of identity, not only that Marko and Sandra change as people, but also their official status in the two countries changes, and their relationship goes through all kinds of trials. The author questions how the same person can be an emigrant in one’s own country and an immigrant in another’s and how these terms allow us to easily put people in a drawer without even listening to their stories.
The Palisander Guitar
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.
Rain in India, summer in Berlin
Rain in India, summer in Berlin contains 18 short stories that bear witness to the author’s ambition to approach the topic of travel in a very special, thematic motif and stylistic way. She does this by grafting her authorial self into a dozen of her fictional alter egos, into her restless companions of completely different life experiences, united by the fact that, in order to live, they have to travel: before us a gallery of nomads is dissolved, made up of ordinary tourists, wanderers, self-willed exiles, pilgrims, all kinds of adventurers, up to professional travelers. With them, the author will travel around the globe – starting from her domicile Zagreb and our emblematic toponyms of Marija Bistrica and Vukovar (from which it is evident that she does not shy away from a hint of autobiography), via Ohrid or the small Czech town of Telč to metropolises such as Berlin and London (where she currently lives), all the way to the exotic Moroccan Marrakesh and Tunisia… and even further, to the very end of the world – to India, the tranquility of the roads and the narrative refuge that clearly fascinates the author (so the plot of even three stories is set in the auspices of Indian culture, so different from hers).
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 which have been awarded and produced in Croatian theatres and by Croatian National Radio.
Dipsut published Kristina’s first book in 2016; Rain in India, Summer in Berlin collects short stories around the theme of traveling and migration. The Palisander Guitar was her first novel, published in 2018; it was in the finals of the T-portal award and got the prestigious ‘Mirko Kovac’ award. The short story Signature won the first prize of the journal Večernji list. Kristina Gavran’s latest novel In Between (2022) was published in Disput and focuses on young people and migration. Her first play written in English was Pepper and Honey produced by Notnow Collective in 2019 and supported by Arts Council England. Kristina currently lives in Cheltenham, England, and works on the project “Birth Stories” about birth stories as part of the CIRCE European Fellowship program.
More selected prose and play translated into English read here: Relations
ĐURĐICA ČILIĆ
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.
The New End is a novel of fragmentary composition, which can also be read as a collection of stories connected by the several same characters. In the novel, which we could conditionally call autofiction, the network of one life and world as we know it from reality, our own and the one lived by our neighbors, is created by the networking of melancholy and vitality.
The novel follows the author’s timeless journey from the moment she finds out that her mother is seriously ill and realizes that their time together is running out. Along the way she offers us glimpses of her life, which are intertwined with the almost weekly five-hour drives on the route Zagreb (Croatia) – Vitez (BiH) to visits her mother and encounters with her own future past, brings scenes from mother’s past that the narrator discreetly writes down on paper next to her headboard, confronts us with the necessity to get used to what you can never get used to, and leads all the way to a cathartic reconciliation with the fact that when a loved one dies, our story about him remains.
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. Fafarikul and The New End were adapted by Croatian National Theatre into play Fafarikul in early 2023.
VLASTA GOLUB
THE RHYTHM OF DEPARTURES
Rhythm of Departures is a psychologically nuanced novel about full-blooded women whose lives were filled with tragedies. The novel follows transgenerational trauma in the case of four heroines whose life without connection, acceptance, joy and support flows through painful events in a remote province. In this novel everyone will find a piece of their own biography, and be immersed in it like in a disheveled parental legacy full of old photos.
Vlasta Golub, born in Virovitica in 1966, graduated Croatian language and literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. She has been professionally employed as an actress at the Virovitica Theater for thirty years. In her forties, she started writing, and in recent years she has established herself as the author of three published and award-winning novels for young people and as the author of radio dramas.
She received the Zvonko Award of the Croatian Society of Writers for Children and Young People for her manuscript “About Love, Plots and Bits of Everything ” in 2016. The novel “Eva, young woman”, was published in 2018, and was shortlisted for the Grigor Vitez Award. She received a scholarship from the Ministry of Culture for the novel “Pauline’s Cats”in 2020. In addition to her published works, in 2021 her radio drama for young people “Nothing could be done” was premiered on Croatian National Televison.