This event will examine, via poetry and prose from Bosnia and Herzegovina, boundary lines of all kinds. We are particularly interested in literary borders, the crossing of borders via the act of translation, and in the second and third lives of texts in new literary and political contexts. Speakers will include Faruk Šehić (author of Quiet Flows the Una; winner of 2013 EU Prize for Literature) and Mirza Purić (literary translator working from German and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian). The conversation will be moderated by BU alumna Stacy Mattingly (MFA, 2011), who has already launched a collective of writers from this region who are engaged with the questions our project is considering as part of a collaboration, The Borders Project, serialized in the journal EuropeNow.
Faruk Šehić was born in 1970 in Bihać, in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Until the outbreak of war in 1992, he studied veterinary medicine in Zagreb. However, the then 22-year-old voluntarily joined the army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which he led a unit of 130 men. After the war he studied literature and has gone on to create his own literary works. Literary critics have hailed Šehić as the leader of the ‘mangled generation’ of writers born in 1970s Yugoslavia, and his books have achieved cult status with readers across the whole region. His collection of short stories ' Under Pressure' (Pod pritiskom, 2004) was awarded the Zoro Verlag Prize. His debut novel 'Quiet Flows the Una' (Knjiga o Uni, 2011) received the Meša Selimović prize for the best novel published in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia in 2011 and the EU Prize for Literature in 2013. His most recent book is a collection of poetry entitled ‘My Rivers’ (Moje rijeke, Buybook, 2014). Šehić lives in Sarajevo and works as a columnist and journalist.
Mirza Purić is a literary translator working from German and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian. He is a contributing editor of EuropeNow and in-house translator for the Sarajevo Writers’ Workshop. From 2014 to 2017 he was an editor-at-large for Asymptote. He has published several book-length translations into BCMS, including Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases, Michael Köhlmeier’s Idylle mit ertrinkendem Hund, and Rabih Alameddine’s The Hakawati. His translations into English have appeared in Asymptote, H.O.W., EuropeNow, PEN America, and elsewhere. Next year Archipelago Books will release his co-translation, with Ellen Elias-Bursac, of Miljenko Jergovic’s story collection Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah.
Co-sponsored by the BU Pardee School Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking. A book-signing will follow the event. |
