Belgrade Noir

About the Contributors

Vladimir Arsenijević was born in 1965 in Pula, Croatia. His first book — In the Hold, an antiwar novel — won the 1994 NIN Award and was translated into twenty languages. Since then, Arsenijević has published numerous novels, graphic novels, and essay collections. He is the founder and president of Association KROKODIL that runs one of the most distinguished literary festivals in the former Yugoslavia. He lives and works in Belgrade.

Muharem Bazdulj was born in Travnik, Bosnia, in 1977. His novels, essays, and short stories have appeared in twenty languages. Three of his books have been translated into English and published in the UK and US: The Second Book, Byron and the Beauty, and Transit, Comet, Eclipse. He lives in Belgrade.

Jamie Clegg is a PhD student of comparative literature at the University of Michigan. She is interested in contemporary Diné (Navajo) poetry and histories, and modern Palestinian literature. She translates from Arabic and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.

Verica Vincent Cole is a crime writer whose novels introduced to readers Belgrade’s first fictional private detective. Cole was born in Belgrade, where, prior to moving to Malta in 1999, she had her own practice as an attorney. After obtaining her degree in international maritime law at the IMO International Maritime Law Institute, she stayed to work at the Institute. She lives in the old city of Rabat, Malta, with her husband Kenneth and their two dogs.

Rachael Daum received her BA in creative writing from the University of Rochester and MA in Slavic Studies from Indiana University; she also received certificates in literary translation from both institutions. Her original work and translations have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Two Lines, EuropeNow, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and elsewhere. Daum is the communications and awards manager at the American Literary Translators Association and lives in Cologne, Germany.

Mirjana Đurđević was born in Belgrade in 1956. She has published seventeen novels, as well as several short stories and essays. Her novel Deda Rankove riblje teorije (Grandpa Ranko’s Fish Theories) won the Female Pen Award in 2004. For her novel Kaya, Belgrade and the Good American, she received the prestigious Meša Selimović Award for the best book in the region in 2009. Her works have been translated into English and Slovenian.

Sibelan Forrester is a professor of Russian language and literature at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Her translations include Irena Vrkljan’s lyrical autobiography The Silk, the Shears and Marina, Milica Mićić Dimovska’s novel The Cataract, and a book of selected poetry by Marija Knežević, Tehnika Disanja (Breathing Technique).

Aleksandar Gatalica was born in 1964 in Belgrade. He graduated with a world literature degree in Ancient Greek from the University of Belgrade’s Faculty of Philology. He is a writer, critic, and translator, best known for his novel The Great War, winner of the NIN Award for Best Serbian Novel of the year. His works have been translated into more than ten languages.

Misha Glenny is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. His best-selling nonfiction book McMafia was translated into thirty-two languages and was broadcast as a BBC and AMC fictional TV drama series. A former BBC Central Europe correspondent, Glenny won the Sony Gold Award for Outstanding Contribution to Broadcasting for his work during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. His books include The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804–2011 and The Fall of Yugoslavia.

Vesna Goldsworthy was born in Belgrade in 1961 and has lived in England since 1986. She is a best-selling writer, academic, and broadcaster. Her books have been translated into twenty-three languages. Her novel Gorsky, serialized on the BBC, was a Waterstones’s Book of the Year and a New York Times Editors’ Choice in 2015. Monsieur Ka, which imagines the life of Anna Karenina’s son, was a London Times Summer Reads for 2019.

Kati Hiekkapelto was born in 1970 in Oulu, Finland, and has lived in Kanjiža, Serbia. She is a crime writer, punk singer, and performance artist. The protagonist of her novels is Detective Anna Fekete, a Hungarian born in Serbia who fled to Finland as a child during the Yugoslav Wars. Her novels have been translated into fifteen languages, and in 2015 she won the Clew of the Year Award, presented by the Finnish Whodunnit Society for the best Finnish crime novel of the year.

Milorad Ivanović is a Serbian investigative reporter and editor. He was editor in chief of the Serbian edition of Newsweek, and executive editor of the daily paper Blic and the weekly publication Novi Magazin. Presently he is an editor at BIRN Serbia in Belgrade. He has a special interest in cross-border journalism and is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. His investigations have included work on human trafficking, Balkan mercenaries in Iraq, and clinical trials.

Miljenko Jergović was born in 1966 in Sarajevo, Bosnia. He published his first article in 1983, and his first book of poetry, Warsaw Observatory, in 1988. He has written several collections of short stories and a dozen novels. In 2012, he received the Angelus Central European Literature Award and in 2018 he won the Georg Dehio Book Prize. His stories and novels have been translated into more than twenty languages. Jergović currently lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia.

Aleksi Koponen is an opera singer and translator who has previously worked as a script reader and literary editor. He lives in London.

McKenna Marko is a graduate student of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Michigan currently residing in Budapest, Hungary. Her research interests include Hungarian and Yugoslav literature, film, and culture. She translates from Hungarian and Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian.

Vladan Matijević was born in 1962 in Čačak, in central Serbia. He served in the Yugoslav People’s Army in the territory of present-day Northern Macedonia. He has published twelve books, has received various awards, and has been translated into several languages. His novels Very Little Light and The Adventures of Mace Aksentijević were both especially successful in France. He lives in Serbia, on the outskirts of a small, gloomy town, and does not like guests.

Nataša Milas was born in 1976 in Sarajevo. She is a scholar of Russian and South Slavic literature and film, and a translator from Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Milas edited a special issue of the literary journal Absinthe 20: New European Writing, focusing on Bosnian prose. Her translation of Muharem Bazdulj’s novel Transit, Comet, Eclipse was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2018. Milas lives in New York City and teaches at New York University.

Genta Nishku is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Michigan and holds a graduate certificate in critical translation studies from the same department. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Balkan literatures, as well as activism and resistance. She translates from Albanian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, and Italian.

Oto Oltvanji was born in 1971 in Subotica, in northern Serbia. He is the author of the novels Black Shoes, The Backbone of the Night, and Splinter. Some of his fifty crime, horror, and science fiction short stories were published in his collection The Tales of Mystery and Magic. He has translated, into Serbian, numerous Jonathan Lethem books. His latest book is a children’s mystery, How I Became a Detective. He lives in Belgrade with his wife and daughter.

Nada Petković is an instructional professor at the University of Chicago. A native of Belgrade, she joined the Slavic Department in the late eighties and prefers to refer to herself as Yugoslav. Her projects include the book Balkan Epic: Song, History, Modernity, coedited with Philip V. Bohlman, and the reader Po naški through Fiction. She is the recipient of honors and awards from the Fulbright Program, the Mellon Foundation, and the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning.

Mirza Purić is a literary translator, a contributing editor at EuropeNow, and a former editor at large at Asymptote. His book-length translations include works by Nathan Englander, Michael Köhlmeier, and Rabih Alameddine. In 2019, Istros Books published his translation of Faruk Šehić’s novel Under Pressure. His cotranslation, with Ellen Elias-Bursać, of Miljenko Jergović’s Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah will be published by Archipelago Books.

Ena Selimović, born in Belgrade, spent much of her childhood in Turkey before migrating to the US in 1998. She is completing her PhD in comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research brings a comparative approach to the study of twentieth- and twenty-first-century US and Balkan literatures, with an interest in establishing their interimperial, racialized, and multilingual network in the historical longue durée.

Goran Skrobonja is one of the leading genre authors in Serbia. He was born in Belgrade in 1962. His publishing and translation work introduced modern horror literature to Serbian readers in the 1990s — books by Stephen King, Clive Barker, and James Herbert. His first horror novel, The Brood, was published in 1993, and he went on to publish several story collections and novels, including his best-selling title, The Man Who Killed Tesla.

Dejan Stojiljković was born in 1976 in Niš, in southern Serbia. His book Constantine’s Crossing was a hugely successful, riveting, multigenre novel. That was just the first in a long line of releases that have won prestigious literary awards and critical accolades. Stojiljković has also written several comic scripts and a collection of essays on comics. His writing style spills from fantasy to horror and everywhere in between.

Jennifer Zoble translates literature from Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Spanish. Her translation of the short story collection Mars by Asja Bakić was published by Feminist Press in 2019. She received a 2018 NYSCA grant for her translation of Zovite me Esteban by Lejla Kalamujić. She’s an assistant clinical professor in the Liberal Studies program at NYU, coeditor of InTranslation at the Brooklyn Rail, and coproducer of the international audio drama podcast Play for Voices.

Vule Žurić is a Serbian writer who was born in 1969 in Sarajevo. He is the author of eleven novels, seven short story collections, and also writes for screen and radio. He has won several major Serbian literature prizes, including the Ivo Andrić Award for Best Book of Short Stories in 2015. He lives in Pančevo, near Belgrade.