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.

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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.

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.

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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