Croatia
Igor Štiks
Igor Štiks was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1977. During the Yugoslav wars he fled to Croatia and currently lives in Belgrade, Serbia. He has also lived in Paris, Chicago, Edinburgh, and Graz. He earned his PhD at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris and Northwestern University and later worked and taught at the University of Edinburgh and the Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade.. In his scholarly work, Štiks investigated the topic of citizenship and nationalism in Balkans. Along with Jo Shaw, he edited the collections Citizenship after Yugoslavia (2013) and Citizenship Rights (2013), and, with Srećko Horvat, Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism (2015). Štiks was honored with the prestigious French distinction Chevalier des arts et des lettres for his literary and intellectual achievements. In addition to winning the Grand Prix of the 2011 Belgrade International Theater Festival for his stage adaptation of Elijah's Chair, Štiks wrote two more plays, Flour in the Veins and Zrenjanin.
All three plays were put on stage by one of the leading post-Yugoslav theater directors Boris Liješević. In 2017, Štiks signed the Declaration on the Common Language of the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins.
W
Translation:: Gjorgji Krstevski
Igor Štiks is a Parisian left-wing intellectual who, after more than twenty-five years, returns to the Adriatic to read the will of Walter Stickler, a conservative French philosopher who was murdered on a Dalmatian island under unexplained circumstances. There he meets the seductive activist Tessa Simon. In Walter's house, the two slowly get to know each other and the secretive, tense and breakneck story about Walter, who went from being a leftist in 1968 to a leading right-wing thinker, and his friend Wladimir, the most influential left-wing militant, whose terrorist handwriting always exuded a touch of irony and who continues to inspire all the young rebels of today.
Igor Štiks' latest novel W is a book that literally cannot be put down. Written in the manner of the best Scandinavian thrillers and superb literary combinatorics, full of intrigue and twists, W gives us a cross-section of the last half century of the European and global left, its struggles, declines and impasses.
This novel, whose atmosphere and style is reminiscent of Paul Auster or Javier Cercas, will not leave anyone indifferent.
REZALIŠTE (THE CUTS)
Translation: Jelena Lužina
One warm evening, after twenty-five years, it was time for the family to meet again in the small Balkan town from which the sons had left, where happiness and progress once reigned, until the shadow of war loomed over them.Now they suddenly returned: the eldest son Vladimir, a distinguished professor of economics, the daughter-in-law Helena and the grandson David. Grandma Nadia and grandfather Clement couldn't wait to see them. At the family dinner appear and the son Igor, a war reporter, who blames himself for the family tragedy.
From the aperitif to the digestif, Igor Styx leads us through a tense and interesting family history that is certainly burdened with the politics of the 20th and 21st centuries. Great-grandfather Oskar plays an important role in it, who as a young Austro-Hungarian soldier participated in the October Revolution, and ended up in a camp during the Second World War. A night in which long-suppressed secrets are revealed, in which clashes and revenges are exchanged, in which it becomes obvious that the past cannot be returned, but that it can be freed from its constraints with humanity and immediacy. The night ends like any other, with a sunrise, but is it a new beginning or just another new departure?
Igor Štiks' "The Cuts" touches on all those cuts and wounds that war creates for people and for each other, deals with emotions and the impossibility of cutting the past and people from one's own life with scissors.
Other translations:
The Judgment of Richard Richter,Ili-Ili, Skopje, 2007.