Martina Vidaić

Martina Vidaić

Martina Vidaić (Zadar, Croatia, 1986) is a writer and poet. She graduated in Croatian Language and Literature from the University of Zadar. Her first poetry collection, The Age of Reptiles, was published in 2011 and received the prestigious Goran Award for Young Poets. This was followed by the collections The Dark Man Birger (2016) and The Mechanics of Pollen (2018), for which she received the Ivan Goran Kovačić Award.

She made her debut as a prose writer with the novel Rat Anatomy (2019), followed in 2021 by Bedbugs, which earned her the European Union Prize for Literature in 2023.

Vidaić is also the author of the poetry-prose book Square, Shop, Knife (2021), which received the Janko Polić Kamov Award, as well as the collection City: Construction. Her poetry and prose have been translated into more than ten languages. In her work, she explores loss, loneliness, family, trauma, human relationships, and the fragile boundary between the inner and outer world, with a distinctive interest in detail, space, and the inner lives of her characters.

 

 

Bedbugs (Drvenice)

Translation to Macedonian: Gjorgji Krstevski

“Antolog”, Skopje, 2026

 

Young architect Gorana Hrabrоv copes with the loss of her partner by writing a letter.

She leaves her rented apartment in Zagreb’s Medveščak neighborhood and sets off to wander through the city, fleeing from two potential crimes in her past. But the city, with its noisy indifference and buildings erected by their inhabitants as defenses against their own fears, exists independently of her drama. Following Gorana through the streets, the reader discovers an architecture of brutal ugliness and faded beauty, and people who pass through one another’s lives almost statistically. Later, she returns to her hometown, where she finds her mother on her deathbed and is confronted with the complicated relationships within her family.

With subtle psychological insight and a sharp eye, Gorana captures the details of physical space—houses, streets, and human characters whose destinies are revealed through the smallest fragments and peculiarities of their lives.

From the loss of her partner to the disintegration of her home, she faces the most difficult question of all: how can we shape our own world without letting it hurt us?

Bedbugs is an outstanding achievement of contemporary Croatian prose—a layered and deeply human novel.