Dubravka Ugrešić

Dubravka Ugrešić was a Croatian-Dutch novelist and essayist born in 1949 in Kutina, Yugoslavia (now Croatia). She was one of the most important Croatian writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, and after being forced into exile from Croatia in the 1990s due to her opposition to Croatian nationalism, she became a celebrated figure in European letters more broadly. She lived in Amsterdam until her death. Ugrešić is the author of novels including Phoebe Phoebe (1991), The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1996), The Ministry of Pain (2004), Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2008), and Fox (2018). Her essay collections, including The Culture of Lies (1996) and Thank You for Not Reading (2003), are devastating critiques of nationalism, cultural memory, and the book market. Her work is marked by formal inventiveness, intellectual rigor, and a fierce political commitment. She received the Neustadt Prize in 2016 and numerous other international awards, but was largely unrecognized in Croatia due to her political exile. She died in Amsterdam in March 2023. Ugrešić is considered one of the great European writers of her era, whose work on exile, memory, and the politics of culture resonates far beyond the former Yugoslavia.