Lana Derkač

Lana Derkač (Požega, 1969) is an award-winning Croatian author of poetry, prose, drama and essay. She graduated from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. Her work was published in large number of Croatian and international newspapers, magazines and anthologies and translated into 18 languages. She is a member of the Croatian PEN Centre and the Croatian Writers Society. She nurtures a peculiar style of writing, combining the modernist with the postmodernist poetic discourse, incorporating intimacy with global apocalyptic phenomena endangering intimacy with astonishment at clips of reality.

Lana Derkač participated in various literary events and festivals: Kuala Lumpur World Poetry Reading (Malaysia), Kritya (India), The Book Fair in Guadalajara (Mexico), International Poetry Meeting (North Cyprus), Festival International et Marche de Poesie Wallonie – Bruxelles (Belgium), Festival Internacional de Poesia in Granada (Nicaragua), Mediterranean Poetry Meeting (Morocco), Stockholm International Poetry Festival (Sweden), International Slav Poetry Festival in Tver (Russia)…

She won the Prize of Korea Literature given by the World Academy of Arts and Culture from Seoul, and her poetry book The Chest for Shadows won the Zdravko Pucak Poetry Prize and the Duhovno Hrašće Prize (Croatia). Her book Adopting the Sky won the Risto Ratkovic Award (Montenegro) for the best poetry book in the region – Montenegro, Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

 

EEG by Daša Drndić wins the Best Translated Book Award

The 2020 edition of Best Translated Book Award went to the novel EEG written by Daša Drndić, translated by Celia Hawkesworth and published by New Directions.

Best Translated Book Award recognizes the previous year's best original translation into English in two categories, fiction and poetry collections. This year, the poetry award went to the Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan, whose collection Time was translated by Sara Riggs.

EEG is Daša Drndić' last novel and her fourth title translated into English by Celia Hawkesworth, the esteemed translator with over 40 translations in her prolific career. Her translation of Belladonna by Daša Drndić won the Warwick Prize in 2018.

The jury of the Best Translated Book Award writes of EEG: “Daša Drndić in her encyclopedic, panoramic novel, superbly translated by Celia Hawkesworth, calls forth the ghosts of Europe’s 20th century in a biting indictment against complacency and the comfort and convenience of forgetting. A frenzy of observations and deeply researched facts, seething with rage and urgency, it is a haunting and masterful final work. A final work that continues on like a river. It rushes, rages through time, collecting detritus and eroding the landscape, shifting and changing at every bend. It smothers and subsumes, with palpable anger as it attempts to drown the reader again and again before granting them air at the last possible moment. There may be no better descriptor for Hawkesworth’s translation of Drndić’s prose than torrential. You may struggle and try to resist, but at a certain point, you will let yourself be swept away by it. You will give in and trust that it knows which way to go. Once in that place, EEG holds and envelops like few books in memory have.”

The Best Translated Book Award was inaugurated in 2008 by Three Percent, the online literary magazine of the University of Rochester. The award takes into consideration not only the quality of the translation but the entire package: the work of the original writer, translator, editor, and publisher. The award is "an opportunity to honor and celebrate the translators, editors, publishers, and other literary supporters who help make literature from other cultures available to American readers."

 

Lana Derkač-works/transl

MAIN WORKS

Wayside Crucifixes (Usputna raspela, Privlačica, 1995), poetry
Lightbearer’s Refuge (Utočište lučonoša, Meandar, 1996), poetry
Eve from Mailbox (Eva iz poštanskog sandučića, Meandar, 1997), poetry
The Chest for Shadows (Škrabica za sjene, Matica hrvatska, 1999), poetry
Resignation (Rezignacija, Meandar, 2000), plays 
Hearkening to Angels (Osluškivanje anđela, Meandar, 2003), short stories 
The Forest Sends Us a Tree by E-mail (Šuma nam šalje stablo e-mailom, DHK, 2004), poetry
Silence's Striptease (Striptiz šutnje, Tribina Jutro poezije, 2006), poetry
Who Lined up the Sky-Scrapers (Tko je postrojio nebodere, Altagama, 2006), poetry
The Flag of Dust (Zastava od prašine, V.B.Z., 2009), short stories 
A Chess Match Against Snow (Šah sa snijegom, HDP, 2011), poetry 
Breakfast for Moths (Doručak za moljce, Naklada Ljevak, 2012), novel 
The Strategist (Strateg, Disput, 2015), essays 
Adopting the Sky (Posvajanje neba, HDP, 2015), poetry
Covenant With Dust (Ugovor s prašinom, JU Ratkovićeve večeri poezije, 2017), poetry selection
The Hotel for the Dead (Hotel za mrtve, V.B.Z., 2020), poetry 


TRANSLATIONS

Murmullo sobre el asfalto: Mexico (La Zonambula), with Davor Šalat 
Who Lined up the Sky-Scrapers, and other poems: Belgium (M.E.O.), Tunis (Al Badawi Publishing & Distribution)

 
 

Milena Benini, the acclaimed translator and author, passed away

After a short and serious illness, Milena Benini, the acclaimed Croatian author and translator, passed away at the age of 54.

Milena Benini was born in Zagreb in 1966. Upon graduating at the classical gymnasium in Zagreb, she studied French language and Literature, Comparative Literature and Journalism at the University of Zagreb, and she graduated in Comparative Literature at the Oxford’s St. George University.

She started writing in elementary school, publishing her first short story in Sirius magazine at the age of 14. Her stories and articles were published in Sirius, Vijenac, Zarez, Ubiq, to name few of them, while her English works were featured in the magazines Neverworlds, Eternity and 69 Flavor of Paranoia.

During her long translating career, she translated the woks of Michel Houellebecq, Boris Vian, Jules Verne, Michael Moorcocka Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Thomas de Quincy, Stephen King, Norman Mailer and many others. 

She's the author of 9 novels, among which the praised Priestess of the Moon and Venetian Falcon, the novella McGuffin Link; her works appeared in the antholohies Salacious Tales and Kontakt: An Anthology of Croatian SF and she co-authored two SF handbooks, The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy and The Complete Guide to Writing Science.

“I write speculative fiction because I find it interesting, to quote Gibson, it's 'literary pop', and that always means a reflection of social dynamics, a space that is seemingly harmless but often more subversive than the so-called 'high literature'.”


The complete works and by Milena Benini can be found on her author's profile.

 

Damir Karakaš-linkovi

www.kriticnamasa.com
http://www.courrierinternational.com/article/2010/05/06/les-nouveaux-miserables
www.dittrich-verlag.de
https://hr-hr.facebook.com/pages/Damir-Karaka%C5%A1-Fan-Club/234110467485
 

Bekim Sejranović has left us too early

After a short and serious illness, the acclaimed writer, translator, musician, eternal nomad, and punker Bekim Sejranović has suddenly passed away in Banja Luka at the age of 48.

Bekim Sejranović was born in Brčko, in 1972. Upon finishing high school, he enrolled at the Faculty of Maritime Studies at the University of Rijeka. After a year, he gave up his dream of becoming a seaman and has begun his studies of the Croatian Language and Literature and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka.

In 1993, he moved to Oslo, Norway, where he graduated in Croatian Literature. At the University of Oslo, he taught South-Slavic sciences, languages and translating. We worked as a court interpreter, literary translator, taught Norwegian to foreigners, wrote and published books.

His novels and short stories collections were translated to several languages: Norwegian, Slovenian, Macedonian, German, Czech, Polish, and Italian. He translated a dozen titles from Norwegian, including the works of Ingvar Ambjørnsen and Frode Grytten, and curated the anthology of the Norwegian short story, The Vast Waste Land (Naklada MD, Zagreb, 2001).

In 2016, in an interview for Moderna vremena, Bekim told the inteviewer Marijo Glavaš: "I have been a punker my entire life, and I don’t mean that in a music sense, but as a life philosophy. For me, punk is every revolt against the elites, the repressive state apparatus, the right to diversity, whatever that diversity entails. Punk is liberation, the struggle against the bleakness of bourgeoisie, questioning of unquestionable 'truths', asking the unpleasant questions, telling the inappropriate stories and most of all, punk is a protest through individuality, subjectivism and singularism.

Always against the flow, that's what punk is."

 

Franjo Janeš-works/transl

MAIN WORKS

Night of the Diving Lead (Noć mrtvih živaca, Algoritam, 2009), novel
Formula for Chaos (Formula za kaos, Algoritam, 2011), novel
Plucking the Phoenix (Čerupanje feniksa, Algoritam, 2013), novel
The Tunnel at the End of the Light (Tunel na kraju svjetla, Fraktura, 2016), novel
The Loop (Petlja, Hena com, 2021), novel


TRANSLATIONS*

*none so far

Main works/Translations
Sample translation
Links
Contacts