Best European Fiction 2013

Author Biographies

BORIVOJE ADAŠEVIĆ was born in 1974 in Užice, now in Serbia. His first books were collections of short stories entitled Ekvilibrista (Balancer, 2000) and Iz trećeg kraljevstva (The Third Kingdom, 2006). These were followed by a novel, Ćovek iz kuće na bregu (The Man from the House on the Hill, 2009). He lives and works in Požega.

BERNARDO ATXAGA was born Joseba Irazu Garmendia in Gipuzkoa, Spain, in 1951. After receiving a degree in economics from the University of Bilbao, he studied philosophy at the University of Barcelona, and worked as an economist, bookseller, professor of the Basque language, publisher, and radio scriptwriter until 1980, when he dedicated himself completely to writing. He lives in the Basque Country, writing in both Basque and Spanish, and many of his works are available in English translation, including Obabakoak (1988, 1992), The Lone Man (1992, 1996), The Lone Woman (1996, 1999), The Accordionist’s Son (2003, 2007), and Seven Houses in France (2009, 2011). Among several Basque prizes for literature and criticism, he was awarded the Premio Nacional de Narrativa in 1989, the Millepages Prix in 1992, and the Prix des trois Couronnes in 1995.

MIRANA LIKAR BAJŽELJ was born in 1961 in Novo Mesto in what is now Slovenia. She is a professor of Slovenian language and literature and has a degree in the same subject, as well as degrees in education and library science. She started writing a few years ago and published her first short stories in the magazines Literatura, Mentor, Sodobnost, and Vpogled. She has received a number of awards for individual stories. Her first short story collection Sobotne zgodbe (Saturday Stories) came out in October 2009 and her second book Sedem besed (Seven Words) was published in 2012.

RUMEN BALABANOV was born in 1950 in Sofia, Bulgaria. His works include Someone Has Gone and the play Beyond the Curve. He received the prestigious “Southern Spring” prize for young writers with his first novel, Honey Dew, and has received numerous other awards, including the Chudomir and Golden Youth prizes. He worked as an editor for Hornet, Bulgaria’s sole humor newspaper, was editor-in-chief of the Literature Front newspaper, and published the Psycho newspaper. He is best known as the founder of Bulgaria’s “gutter press.” Balabanov became a TV producer and owned Channel 2001 from 2000 to 2006. He is currently editor-in-chief of Word Today, the official newspaper of the Union of Bulgarian Writers.

BALLA is a highly original voice on Slovakia’s literary scene, the author of absurdist short stories populated by a gallery of lonely, alienated, and peculiar characters unable to relate to other human beings and undergoing bizarre, often frightening experiences. A recipient of several literary awards, Balla shuns the spotlight and continues to live in the provincial town of Nové Zámky. He published the first of his seven short story collections, Leptokária, in 1996. His recent books include the collections De la Cruz (2005) and Cudzí (Strangers, 2008). In 2011 he published a novella, V mene otca (In the Name of the Father), followed by another, Oko (The Eye), in 2012.

DANIEL BATLINER was born in Eschen, Liechtenstein, in 1988, where he spent most of his childhood. He began to write while very young, predominantly for the stage. Though many of his works had already been performed in Switzerland, where he lived until recently, spring 2012 found his first full-length plays Wodka Nicotschow and Once Oberland, Please! debuting to great acclaim in his native Liechtenstein, where he now resides.

ARI BEHN was born in 1972 in Aarhus, grew up in England and Northern Norway, and is currently a resident of Bærum. His debut story collection Trist som faen (Sad as Hell) appeared in 1999 to great acclaim; he has since published three novels. His most recent publication is a collection of short fictions, Talent for lykke (Talent for Luck, 2011). He married Princess Märtha Louise of Norway in 2002, and they have three daughters.

KRIKOR BELEDIAN is an Armenian writer, literary critic, and translator living in France. He was born in Beirut in 1948 and teaches Armenian Studies at the Université Catholique de Lyon and the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris. He is the author of six novels and multiple volumes of critical essays and poetry.

LASHA BUGADZE was born in 1977 and is a Georgian novelist and playwright. He has won an award from the BBC International Radio Playwriting Competition (for his drama The Navigator) as well as the SABA Awards for Best Novel and Best Play of the Year. Bugadze is also a cartoonist, screenwriter, producer, and TV personality with the Georgian Public Broadcasting Company.

A. S. BYATT is internationally acclaimed as a novelist, short story writer and critic. Her books include Possession, The Children’s Book, and the quartet of The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling Woman. She was appointed Dame of the British Empire in 1999.

DULCE MARIA CARDOSO was born in Trás-os-Montes, Portugal, in 1964. She spent her childhood in Angola and returned to Portugal in 1975, after which she studied law and wrote film scripts. Campo de sangue (Field of Blood, 2002) was her first novel, and it won her the Grande Prémio Acontece. In 2009 she was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature for her novel Os meus sentimentos (My Feelings). In 2010 she won the PEN Prize for her novel O chão dos pardais (Sparrow Ground).

SYLWIA CHUTNIK was born in 1979 in Warsaw. She graduated with a degree in Culture and Gender Studies from Warsaw University, and is currently a social worker and the President of the MaMa Foundation, which promotes the rights of mothers in Poland. She is also a member of the feminist group Porozumienie Kobiet 8 Marca, and she works as a Warsaw city tour guide. She is the author of Kieszonkowy Atlas Kobiet (The Pocket Atlas of Women, 2008), a book that was nominated Book of the Year by the Polish Radio Programme Three, awarded the Polityka Passport Prize in literature, and longlisted for the Nike Literary Prize in 2009.

VITALIE CIOBANU was born in 1964 in Floresti, Moldova. He is a novelist, essayist, literary critic, and president of Moldova PEN Centre. He is editor-in-chief of Contrafort literary magazine, contributes articles to numerous cultural and political magazines in Moldova and Romania, and works as an analyst for the Chisinau bureau of Radio Free Europe. He received the Union of Romanian Writers Essay Prize in 1999. His short stories have been translated into English, German, and Spanish.

BERNARD COMMENT born in Switzerland, lives and works in Paris, where he directs the prestigious Fiction & Cie imprint at Éditions du Seuil. He is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, including the story collection Tout passe (Everything Passes), which received the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle in 2011.

ZEHRA ÇIRAK was born in 1960 in Istanbul, Turkey. She moved to Germany with her family in 1962 and has lived in Berlin since 1982. Among other awards, she has won the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize (1989 and 2001) and the Hölderlin Prize (1994). She is the author of Vogel auf dem Rücken eines Elefanten: Gedichte (Bird on the Back of an Elephant, 1991); Fremde Flügel auf eigener Schulter (Stranger Wings on One’s Own Shoulder, 1994); Leibesübungen (Abdominal Exercises, 2000); and Der Geruch von Glück (The Scent of Happiness, 2011), among others.

KRISTIINA EHIN was born in Rapla, Estonia in 1977. She studied Comparative and Estonian Folklore at the University of Tartu, and in her native Estonian has to date published six volumes of poetry, three books of short stories, and a retelling of South-Estonian fairy tales; she is also the author of two plays. She has won Estonia’s most prestigious poetry prize for Kaitseala (Protected Area, 2005), a book of poems and journal entries written during a year spent as a nature-reserve warden on an otherwise uninhabited island off Estonia’s north coast. Her work has been translated into numerous languages, including, in English, six books of her poetry and three of prose, with her work making frequent appearances in English-language journals. She is a highly acclaimed performer of her own writing, and travels extensively around Estonia and abroad to perform her work, sometimes accompanied by musicians.

GYRÐIR ELÍASSON was born in Reykjavik in 1961, but spent most of his childhood in Sauðárkrókur in northwest Iceland. He is a poet, fiction writer, and translator: his first poetry collection was published in 1983, and since then he has published poetry collections, novels, and collections of short stories—the latter including 2003’s Steintré (The Stone Tree), which was published in English translation in 2008. Elíasson is also a diligent translator, mainly from English, and has translated works by William Saroyan and Richard Brautigan. He has been labelled “the great stylist” in Icelandic contemporary literature, and won the Icelandic Literary Prize as well as the Halldor Laxness Prize for Literature in 2000 for his short-story collection Gula húsið (The Yellow House). He was nominated twice for the Nordic Council Literature Prize before he won the prize in 2011. He currently lives in Reykjavík with his wife and three children.

PAUL EMOND was born in Brussels in 1944. After obtaining a degree and a doctorate of letters at the University of Louvain (with a thesis on the novels of Jean Cayrol), he spent three years in Czechoslovakia and wrote his first novel, La danse du fumiste (The Dance of a Sham, 1979). Returning to Belgium, he published other novels and worked for the Archives et usées de la littérature in Brussels, eventually becoming a professor at the Institut des Arts de Diffusion, in the Graduate School for Theater and Film, where he teaches now. An accomplished dramatist as well as fiction writer, Emond’s first play debuted in 1986, with more than fifteen to follow, these being performed in numerous countries, including France, Quebec, the United States, England, Romania, and Bulgaria.

RAY FRENCH was born in Wales. His first book was The Red Jag & other stories (Planet, 2000). His novel All This Is Mine (2003) was translated into Italian and Dutch, and he was a co-author of Four Fathers (2006) a collection of stories about fatherhood, which was translated into Spanish. His second novel Going Under (2007) is about a middle-aged man who, faced with redundancy, buries himself alive in his back garden and refuses to come up until everyone’s job is saved. The Sunday Times said, “Given that our hero spends most of its three hundred pages in a box, the pace and plotting of this novel are remarkable… ” It was translated into French and German, and adapted for German radio. His forthcoming novel Welcome To The Reservation, is about a Native American who arrives in a desolate ex-mining town in the Welsh Valleys, pledging to save an ancient yew from being chopped down to make way for a supermarket. He teaches at the University of Hull.

CHRISTINA HESSELHOLDT, born 1962, has been called “one of Denmark’s finest prose writers” by the major daily Information. After early work in poetry and experimental prose, she has published eight novels, one collection of short stories, and three volumes of linked stories: Camilla and the Horse (2008); Camilla—og resten af selskabet (Camilla—and the Rest of the Party, 2010); and Selskabet gør op (The Party Breaks Up, 2012). Various of her books have been published in Norwegian, Swedish, French, Spanish, Serbian, and Arabic.

KIRILL KOBRIN was born in 1964 in Nizhny Novgorod (then Gorky), Russia. He writes both fiction and nonfiction, co-edits the Moscow magazine of sociology, history, and politics Neprikosnovennij Zapas (Emergency Rations), and conducts research into the cultural history of Russia and the Czech Republic. Kobrin is the author of twelve books, of which the latest is a tribute to Flann O’Brien entitled Tekstoobrabotka (Bookhandling). He has been hailed by critics as the “Russian Borges” and is considered one of the founders of Russian psychogeography. His work has been translated into several European languages. Kobrin lives in Prague.

ŽARKO KUJUNDŽISKI was born in 1980 in Skopje, Macedonia. His first novel Spectator, was published in 2003 and went through five editions. His later works include (in Macedonian): Andrew, Love, and Other Disasters (2004), America (2006), Found and Lost (2008), and a collection of short stories, 13 (2010). He has also published award-winning short stories and essays, several of which have been translated. In 2009 he received his MA in World and Comparative Literature from Sts. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. He is editor-in-chief at the Antolog publishing house and e-zine Reper (reper.net.mk). He also writes weekly columns for the daily newspaper Dnevnik.

DAN LUNGU was born in 1969 in Botoani, Romania. A sociologist by training, he is one of Romania’s leading authors today. To date, he has written four novels, two volumes of short stories, and he has edited several collections. His books have been translated into ten languages, and his novel Sînt o baba comunista! (I’m a Communist Old Hag!, 2007) is currently being made into a film. He has founded the literary group Club 8, playing an important part in the literary life of postcommunist Romania. He has been nominated for the Jean Monnet European Literature Prize and received many other literary prizes.

TOMÁS MAC SÍOMÓIN was born in Dublin in 1938. He received his doctorate in biology from Cornell University and has worked as a biological researcher and university lecturer in the USA and Ireland, as well as a journalist, editor of the newspaper Anois, translator (from Catalan), and editor of the literary and current affairs journal Comhar. His collection of short stories, Cinn Lae Seangáin (The Diary of an Ant, 2005) won the award for best short story collection in the Oireachtas competition in 2005, and his novel An Tionscadal (The Project, 2007) won the main Oireachtas award in 2007. His most recent novel is the futuristic science fiction An bhfuil Stacey ag iompar? (2011).His work has been translated into many languages, most recently into Slovenian, Romanian, and Catalan. He now lives and works in Catalonia, Spain.

TANIA MALYARCHUK was born in 1983 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, and is considered one of Ukraine’s most talented young prose writers. Her first novel, Adolpho’s Endspiel, or a Rose for Liza, appeared in 2004. Her later collections of short fiction include From Above Looking Down: A Book of Fears (2006), How I Became a Saint (2006), To Speak (2007), and Bestiary of Words (2009). She is the only Ukrainian writer under thirty to have had her collected works published in a single volume (as The Divine Comedy, in 2009). In 2012 she published her second novel The Biography of a Chance Miracle. She splits her time between Vienna and Ivano-Frankivsk.

MIKE MCCORMACK was born in London in 1965 and grew up in Ireland. His first collection of short stories, Getting it in the Head (1996), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1996 and was New York Times Book of the Year in 1998. He co-wrote the screenplay for an award-winning short film adaption of one of the stories in the collection, “The Terms.” He has also published two novels, Crowe's Requiem (1998) and Notes from a Coma (2005), which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award in 2006. He is currently writer-in-residence at the University of Ireland in Galway and teaches fiction writing for the MA program there.

SEMEZDIN MEHMEDINOVIĆ was born in 1960 in Kiseljak, Bosnia. He is a writer, filmmaker, and editor, and is the author of five books, two of which—the poetry collection Nine Alexandrias (2003) and the acclaimed novel Sarajevo Blues (2001)—are available in English translation. When the war in Bosnia began in 1992, he and his family remained as “internally displaced” persons in besieged Sarajevo. Together with friends, he started a new magazine Dani (Days), in an effort to support the spirit of democratic rule and pluralism during what soon became a systematic genocide against his compatriots. The magazine remains Bosnia’s leading news and cultural venue. His articles, poems, and essays have been translated and published in leading European and American newspapers and magazines, including The Village Voice, Conjunctions, TriQuarterly, Der Spiegel, and others. He and his family arrived in the US in 1996 as political refugees and currently live in Alexandria, Virginia.

LYDIA MISCHKULNIG lives in Vienna, Austria. She has won numerous prizes, including the Bertelsmann Literature prize, the Elias Canetti Award, the Austrian Literary Scholarship, and the Joseph Roth Award. Her publications in German include Umarmung (Embrace, 2002), Hollywood im Winter (Hollywood in Winter, 1996 and 2012), Macht euch keine Sorgen (Don’t Worry, 2009), and Schwestern der Angst (Sisters of Fear, 2010). She maintains a website at www.lydiamischkulnig.net and publishes essays in Spectrum (Die Presse) and Album (Der Standard).

DRAGAN RADULOVIC was born in Cetinje, Montenegro, in 1969. He published his first collection of short stories, Petrifikacija (Petrification) in 2001 and his first novel Auschwitz Café, in 2003. He also published two collections of short pieces, Vitezovi ništavila (Knights of Nothingness, 2005), and Splav Meduze (The Raft of the Medusa, 2007). Dragan Radulović currently lives in Budva, where he teaches philosophy at the Danilo Kiš Secondary School and writes essays and literary reviews for Montenegrin periodicals.

TIINA RAEVAARA was born in 1979 in Kerava, Finland. In 2005 she received her doctorate in genetics from the University of Helsinki. Her first novel, Eräänä päivänä tyhjä taivas (One Day, an Empty Sky) was published in 2008. Her first collection of short stories, En tunne sinua vierelläni (I Don’t Feel You Beside Me, 2010) won the prestigious Runeberg prize. Her most recently work is a scientific exploration of the relationship between dogs and humans Koiraksi ihmisille (About Dogs and Humans, 2011). Her fiction, which draws on elements of science fiction, fantasy, and surrealism, stands apart from the largely realistic mainstream of contemporary Finnish literature.

MARIE REDONNET was born Martine l'Hospitalier in 1948 in Paris. Her first publication was a volume of poetry, Le Mort & Cie, in 1985 (Dead Man & Company, 2005). Her works since include short story collections, novels, and dramatic works, are available in English translation: Forever Valley (1992), Hôtel Splendid (1994), Rose Méllie Rose (1994), Candy Story (1995), and Nevermore (1996). In 2006-2007, she was visiting professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She currently divides her time between Morocco and Aix en Provence.

GUNDEGA REPŠE was born in 1960 in Riga, Latvia. A graduate of the Latvian State Art Academy, Repše made her literary debut at nineteen with her short story “A Camel in Olde Towne of Riga.” Since then, she has authored five short-story collections and seven novels, and she is considered one of contemporary Latvia’s most brilliant writers. Repše’s interest in cultural processes and art are apparent in her biographical novel-essays on Latvian artists and countless reviews and columns in major literary magazines and newspapers. Repše’s work has also been adapted for the stage in Latvia—the play Stigma at the Daile Theater; the play Smagais metals (Heavy Metal), based on the novel Alvas kliedziens (The Tin Scream), at the New Riga Theater; and the play Juras velni (Sea Devils) at the National Theater.

ELOY TIZÓN was born in Madrid in 1964. His novel Velocidad de los jardines (1992) was hailed by critics as one of the most interesting Spanish novels of the last 25 years. His novel Seda salvaje (1995) was finalist for the Thirteenth Premio Herralde prize. Excerpts of his work have been translated into English, French, Italian, German and, Finnish. His most recently novel is Parpadeos (2006).

IEVA TOLEIKYTĖ was born in 1989 in Vilnius, Lithuania. She is currently studying Scandinavian philology at Vilnius University. She became interested in literature in early childhood and began writing quite young—at first some abstract sketches and poems before going on to short stories. In 2009 her first collection of short stories, Garstyciunamas (The House of Mustard), was published; “The Eye of the Maples,” which comes from that collection, is her first piece to be translated into English. She has also published poems and short stories in various Lithuanian magazines.

MIKLÓS VAJDA was born in 1931 and is editor emeritus of The Hungarian Quarterly, for which he worked from 1964, becoming editor in 1990. His “essay-memoir” Anyakép, amerikai keretben (Portrait of a Mother in an American Frame) was published in Hungarian in 2010. He has translated numerous American and British plays into Hungarian, and he currently lives in Budapest.