Author(s): Nenad Popović / Language(s): Croatian
A book of essays Living with Them is the anatomy of the last Yugoslav decade, and the first three decades of Croatian reality. As an autonomous observer, and an analyst of cultural and ideological patterns, Nenad Popović creates a sketch for the typology of Croatian intellectuals, artists and politicians’ public personae. He creates sketches of mindsets that harbour religious fundamentalism, Yugonostalgia, or partake in the phenomena of mass culture. As in his previous books and public interventions, Popović is a pessimistic chronicler of his time, and his essays are qualified testimonies of a disjointed, crazy time in which Croatia and Europe are looking for themselves - spiritually, politically and economically. This book is a kind of Popović’s “private encyclopaedia” of Croatia. Although the author sees only caricatures and dramas of the big Croatian self-deception and its continuous blindness, from the late communism until this day, we can still discern his invitation to take a mirror in our hands.
Publisher, translator, and writer Nenad Popović was born in Zagreb in 1950. He attended colleges in Zagreb and Bonn, and Freiburg with the scholarship Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. He graduated in German Language and Literature and South Slavic Languages and Literature from the Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. In 1980. he became an editor, and afterwards the head editor of the publishing house Graphical Institute of Croatia. In 1990. he co-founded the publishing house Durieux, one of the first independent private publishing houses in Croatia, where he worked as the head editor until 2013. In 1999. he participated in founding of the literary Group 99. In 2002 he became one of founders of the Croatian Writers’ Society, becoming its vice-president afterwards. Since 1978, he has occasionally written for newspapers, magazines and radio, and since 1985 for the media of German speaking countries (Manuskripte, Literatur und Kritik, Kulturaustausch, Frankfurter Rundschau, Die Zeit, Weltwoche, et al.). For theatre he translated such authors as Sternheim, Bruckner, Bernhard, Fassbinder among others. He also translated books by Erwin Piscator, Kazimir Malevič, Boris Kelemen, Benn Meyer-Wehlack, Tilla Durieux and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. During Bosnian wars, he translated articles by Bosnian writers (Karahasan, Lovrenović, Filipović, Jergović) for German newspapers and magazines. He published books A World in Shadow (2008), A Treatise on Population (2014), Diary from the City of P. (2017), and Living with Them (2021). For his work he received many awards and accolades: Premio '92 per il lavoro letterario from the Italian Cultural Institute in Zagreb (1992), The Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding (1999), and, with Freimut Duve, Bruno Kreisky Award (1999). He was also awarded the Hermann Kesten Medal by the German PEN Centre in 2000. The same year he became an honorary citizen of Sarajevo. He is a member of the following organisations: Croatian PEN Centre, Cap Anamur - German Emergency Doctors, Cologne; Journalisten helfen Journalisten, München; International Forum Bosnia, Sarajevo; Association of Literary Translators of Croatia. He lives in Pula.
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