A Reading and Conversation with Orhan Pamuk,
July 5, 2020
A Reading and Conversation with Dubravka Ugrešić, July 13, 2020
Over the past
three decades, Dubravka Ugrešić has established herself as one of Europe’s most distinctive novelists and essayists. From her early postmodernist excursions, to her elegiac reckonings in fiction and the essay with the disintegration of her Yugoslav homeland and the fall of the Berlin Wall, through to her more recent writings on popular and literary culture, Ugrešić's work is marked by a rare combination of irony, polemic, and compassion.
Following degrees in Comparative and Russian Literature, Ugrešić worked for many years at the University of Zagreb’s Institute for Theory of Literature, successfully pursuing parallel careers as both a writer and as a scholar. In 1991, when war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, Ugrešić took a firm anti-war stance, critically dissecting retrograde Croatian and Serbian nationalism, the stupidity and criminality of war, and in the process became a target for nationalist journalists, politicians and fellow writers. Subjected to prolonged public ostracism and persistent media harassment, she left Croatia in 1993.
In an exile that has in time become emigration, her books have been translated into over twenty languages. She has taught at a number of American and European universities, including Harvard, UCLA, Columbia and the Free University of Berlin. She is the winner of several major literary prizes (Austrian State Prize for European Literature 1998; finalist of Man Booker International Prize 2009; Jean Améry Essay Prize, awarded for her essayistic work as a whole, 2012; Vilenica Prize 2016; while Karaoke Culture was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism 2011. She is the winner of the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Ugresic lives in Amsterdam.
Marko Juvan, "Peripherocentrism," July 27, 2020
Marko Juvan (b. 1960) is literary theorist and comparatist, head of the ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies, and professor of Slovenian literature at the University of Ljubljana. He is member of the IWL Advisory Board and of the editorial boards of the journals Primerjalna književnost and CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, as well as of the Section Committee for Literary and Theatrical Studies of the Academia Europaea. In addition to numerous articles and edited volumes – e.g., Prostori slovenske književnosti (Spaces of Slovenian Literature, 2016), World Literatures from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century (2013) – his recent book publications include History and Poetics of Intertextuality (2008), Literary Studies in Reconstruction (2011), Prešernovska struktura in svetovni literarni system (The Prešernian Structure and the World Literary System, 2012), and the second, e-edition of Imaginarij Krsta v slovenski literaturi: medbesedilnost recepcije (The Imaginary of Baptism at the Savica in Slovene Literature: the Intertextuality of Reception, 2016): http://ezb.ijs.si/fedora/get/ezmono:imaginarij/VIEW/.