Croatia
Kristina Gavran
Kristina Gavran was born in Zagreb in 1987. She gained M.A. in Dramaturgy at the Academy of Dramatic Arts. She worked as a drama teacher and lecturer at the Tirena Drama Studio, performed in plays for children and young people, as well as lead various writing and drama workshops. Kristina has been a writer for teatar.hr, a theatre web portal, for two years. Her full length play ‘Daedalus and Icarus’ presented at the Academy of Dramatic Arts as part of a dramaturgy project DeSaDu 2012. The play was produced by Croatian National Radio and is translated in English. ‘Ready’ was awarded the first prize Marin Držić by the Croatian Ministry of Culture (2012). Kristina also writes plays for children. Two times she won Mali Marulić contest for best play for children. In 2013 Kristina was granted an Erasmus scholarship for an internship at The Blue Orange Theatre in Birmingham for seven months. During her term she worked on various projects including the production of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’. In 2014 she was chosen as one of the emerging writers for the Foundry program at The Birmingham Repertory Theatre where she is working on her first play in English. In England she discovered storytelling which became her passion and now she performs regularly with a Birmingham based group of storytellers called Flashlight Storytellers led by the nationally acclaimed Cat Weatherill. With her colleague Tina Hofman she started a theatre company Notnow Collective. Kristina has two books published: ‘Rain in India, Summer in Berlin’ (2016) and ‘The Palisander Guitar’ (2018).
GITRARA OD PALISANDRA (THE PALISANDER GUITAR)
Translation: Vladimir Jankovski
Novel is focused on five women's destinies. Seemingly centuries apart, each in their own world and in their own story, with their own closed worlds that have evolved from myths and superstitions to contemporary patterns of behavior and female emancipation, at the end of the novel these women will be connected in a great story about the mysterious connections that exist between centuries, sometimes connected with invisible threads, and sometimes, as in this case, the guitar as the artifact of the big circle of life.
In this novel, everything is in its place, the composition is reminiscent of great musical works and the way they were composed.
Shortlisted for European prize for literature (2018).