Croatian writer and essayist Dubravka Ugresic has died in Amsterdam at the age of 73. This was reported by the Croatian news agency HINA, citing the publisher Multimedijalni Institut in Zagreb, which published their books in Croatia. Ugresic emerged as an astute critic of nationalism and chauvinism of all kinds.
In 1993 she left her homeland, which had become independent two years earlier. She lived in the USA and most recently in the Netherlands. She was heavily attacked in Croatia for her incorruptible and negative attitude towards the prevailing nationalist politics at the time. Under President and State founder Franjo Tudjman (1922-1999), the state-controlled media unleashed campaigns of defamation and hatred against the writer. Croatia, a former Yugoslav republic, held its own in the war against the aggressor Serbia (1991-1995), but also committed war crimes against Serbian civilians itself.
Many of Ugresic’s books have been translated into German. Among others, she published the novels “The Ministry of Pain” (2005) and “Baba Yaga Laid an Egg” (2008) as well as the volumes of essays “No one at home” (2007) and “Karaokekultur” (2012). In 1999 she received the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, in 2000 the Heinrich Mann Prize of the Academy of Arts (Berlin) and in 2012 the Jean Amery Prize for European Essay Writing. In her work, Ugresic impresses with “brilliant intellectual analyzes of current problems that concern us all,” said the jury for the award of the Amery Prize.
Mayer: “Your voice will be missing”
“Dubravka Ugresic wrote in great clarity against the war and the growing nationalism of her native Croatia. Exposed to public ostracism and branded as a traitor, she left her homeland in 1993. In exile she writes bravely, ironically and with a lot of compassion about her lost homeland and touches us readers deeply,” Austria’s State Secretary for Art and Culture Andrea Mayer (Greens) reacted to the news of his death. “Dubravka Ugresic’s voice will be missed, her journalistic power against war, violence and nationalism lives on in her books.”
