Globetrotter

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

DAVID ALBAHARI (b. 1948), a Serbian writer and translator, has published eleven collections of short stories and thirteen novels, all in Serbian, including Shadows (short stories, 2006) and Leeches (novel, 2005). His Description of Death won the Ivo Andrić Award for the best book of short stories published in Yugoslavia in 1982. Bait won the NIN Prize for the best novel published in Yugoslavia in 1996, as well as the Balcanica Award and the Berlin Bridge Prize. His books have been translated into sixteen languages. Two collections of short stories and six novels have been published in English.

David Albahari has translated into Serbian many books by contemporary British, American, Australian, and Canadian authors, including stories and novels by Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, V. S. Naipaul, and Vladimir Nabokov. He has also translated plays by Sam Shepard, Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill, and Jason Sherman.

He is a member of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts.

In 1994 he moved to Calgary, Canada, with his wife and two children; since 2012 he has been spending more of his time in Serbia.

ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAĆ has been translating novels and nonfiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers for more than twenty years. She has translated two books of short stories and four novels by David Albahari, as well as works by Daša Drndić, Antun Šoljan, Dubravka Ugrešić, and Karim Zaimović.

Her translation of David Albahari’s book of short stories Words Are Something Else received the translation award of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) in 1998, and her translation of Albahari’s novel Götz and Meyer received the National Translation Award of the American Literary Translation Association (ALTA) in 2006. She received a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) translation fellowship and was a fellow at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre in 2011.