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.
