Germany
Saša Stanišić
Saša Stanišić is a Bosnian-German writer. He was born in Višegrad, Bosnia and Herzegovina as the son of a Bosniak mother and a Serbian father. In the spring of 1992, he fled alongside his family to Germany as a refugee of the Bosnian War. Stanišić spent the remainder of his youth in Heidelberg, where his teachers encouraged his passion for writing. After graduating from high school, he enrolled in the University of Heidelberg, graduating with degrees in Slavic studies and German as a second language. In 2006, Stanišić released his debut novel, published in English as “How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone”. The book won multiple awards both in Germany and abroad and has been translated into 31 languages as of 2019. In 2019 he won the German Book Prize for his novel “Herkunft”. In his acceptance speech Stanišić expressed his disgust with the decision of the Nobel Committee to award the 2019 Literature Nobel Prize to the Austrian author Peter Handke.
HERKUNFT (WHERE YOU COME FROM)
Translation: Elena Koneska Svetieva
You find yourself in the strange, dimly lit cave of time. One passageway curves downward, the other leads upward. It occurs to you that the one leading down may go to the past and the one leading up may go to the future. Which one do you decide to take?
Saša Stanišic's Where You Come From is a novel about a village where only thirteen people remain, a country that no longer exists, a shattered family that is his own. Blending autofiction, fable, and choose-your-own-adventure, Stanišic explores a family's escape during the conflict in Yugoslavia, and the years that followed as they built a life in Germany.
He examines what it means to learn a new language, to find new friends and new jobs, to build an identity between countries and cultures. Thi novel is about homelands, both remembered and imagined.
A book that bends form and genre with wit, heart, and exceptional craftsmanship to explore questions that lie inside all of us: about language and shame, about arrival and making it just in time, about luck and death, about what role our origins and memories play in our lives.
Other books in Macedonian:
How the soldier repairs the gramophone, "Goten", Skopje, 2015.