Slavenka Drakulić
Slavenka Drakulić | |
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essayist | |
Alma mater | University of Zagreb |
Subject | |
Notable awards | Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding 2005 They Would Never Hurt a Fly |
Slavenka Drakulić (born July 4, 1949) is a
Biography
Drakulić was born in
Drakulić temporarily left Croatia for Sweden in the early 1990s for political reasons during the
Her noted works relate to the
Her 2008 novel, Frida's Bed, is based on a biography of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.
Her 2011 book of essays, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism: Fables from a Mouse, a Parrot, a Bear, a Cat, a Mole, a Pig, a Dog, & a Raven, was published by Penguin in the US, and was widely reviewed to great acclaim.[7] The book consists of eight reflections told from the point of view of a different animal. Each beast reflects on the remembrance of communism in different countries in Eastern Europe. In the second-to-last chapter, a Romanian dog explains that under capitalism everyone is unequal "but some are more unequal than others", an inversion of a famous George Orwell quote from Animal Farm.[8]
In 2021, Drakulić published a new essay collection, Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism, which reflected on the continued divisions between Eastern and Western Europe even thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The title of this book refers back to the two essay collections she published in the 1990s, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (1992) and Café Europa: Life After Communism (1997), and attempts to take stock of the last three decades of changes. Drakulić writes about the bitter disappointments felt by many East Europeans who expected that the revolutions of 1989 would usher in a new era of democracy and prosperity. Instead, the essays in this collection reveal that East Europeans still feel like second class citizens. In her chapter discussing what she calls "European food apartheid," Drakulić describes how investigators found that Western corporations sold lower quality products in the East under the same brand names and packaging they use in the West: fish sticks with less fish in them and biscuits made with cheaper palm oil instead of butter.[9] Drakulić also ruminates on the persistence of post-communist nostalgia in the region, as people try to grapple with both the positive and negative legacies of their collective pasts. She writes, “In all former communist countries in Eastern Europe, it is difficult to mention the merits of communism, a system that, in a short time, brought modernization and changed an agrarian society into an urbanized, industrial one. It meant general education as well as the emancipation of women; this has to be recognized, even though such changes were accomplished by a totalitarian regime.” [10]
Drakulić lives in Stockholm and Zagreb. In 2020, she contracted a severe case of Covid-19 and was hospitalized for twelve days in an intensive care unit, six of which she spent on a ventilator.[11]
Bibliography
Fiction
- Holograms Of Fear Hutchinson, London (1992).
- Marble Skin Hutchinson, London (1993).
- The Taste of a Man Abacus, London (1997)
- S -a novel about Balkans (also known as: "As If I Am Not There") (1999). Made into a movie "As If I Am Not There", directed by Juanita Wilson.
- Frida's Bed Penguin USA, New York (2008),[12] (translated by Christina P. Zorić)[13]
Non-fiction
- Smrtni grijesi feminizma (1984) only in Croatian
- How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Hutchinson, London (ISBN 978-0060975401
- Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of the War, W.W. Norton, New York (ISBN 978-0060976088
- ISBN 978-0140277722
- ISBN 978-0143035428
- "Tijelo njenog tijela" (2006) available in Croatian, German and Polish. Available as an e-book in English "Flesh of Her Flesh".
- "Two Underdogs and a Cat", Seagull Books . London, NY, Calcutta (2009)
- A Guided Tour through the Museum of Communism. Fables from a Mouse, a Parrot, a Bear, a Cat, a Mole, a Pig, a Dog, and a Raven, Penguin, New York, (
- Cafe Europa Revisited, Penguin (
Articles
- We Are All Albanians 1999
- Bosnian Women Witness 2001
- Crime in the circles of power October 2008
- Slavenka Drakulic Interview 2009
- Articles on Eurozine
- Articles in The Nation
- Articles in The Guardian
- Rape as a Weapon of War 2008
- Slavenka Drakulic and Katha Pollitt in conversation 2011
References
- ^ “Slavenka Drakulic”, Women in European History, Nora Augustine
- ^ Drakulic author page, The Guardian
- ^ "Masthead". 24 March 2010. Retrieved May 1, 2018.
- ^ "Blood and lipstick", Melissa Benn, The Guardian, January 23, 1992 p. 19
- ^ Novelist strives for total democracy in Yugoslavia Gail Schmoller, Chicago Tribune, December 15, 1991
- ^ Slavenka Drakulic Biography at the DAAD Artist-in-Residence Program
- ^ Animal farm: the tale of the mouse and the mole, The Economist, March 17, 2011
- ^ Animal nature, The New Republic, Timothy Snyder, March 3, 2011
- ^ Cafe Europa Revisited, Kirkus Reviews, January 5, 2021
- ^ Cafe Europa Revisited 2021
- ^ Slavenka Drakulić, "Surviving COVID-19: Waking up after six days on a ventilator" The Yale Review, November 9, 2022
- Afterellen.com, Heather Aimee O..., November 23, 2008
- ^ "Frida's Bed". www.publishersweekly.com. Retrieved December 6, 2019.
- ^ Selected Foreign Language Editions of A Guided Tour through the Museum of Communism.
- ^ Selected Foreign Language Editions of Cafe Europa Revisited
External links
- The official Slavenka Drakulic Site
- Slavenka Drakulic Interview 2009
- Slavenka Drakulic receives the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding
- Extract from "Two Underdogs and a Cat"
- Slavenka Drakulic speaking at Festivaletteratura 2009 - Scintille: La leggenda del Muro di Berlino
- Public lecture by Slavenka Drakulić: “Intellectuals as Bad Guys? The Role of Intellectuals in the Balkan Wars' May 15–19, 2014, Kyiv Ukraine: Thinking Together
- Book Talk by Slavenka Drakulić: Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism, Harriman Institute at Columbia University, April 5, 2022