Slavenka Drakulić

Slavenka Drakulić is a noted Croatian writer and publicist who currently lives in Sweden.

Slavenka Drakulić was born in Rijeka, Croatia, in 1949 (in what was then socialist Yugoslavia). She graduated in comparative literature and sociology from the University in Zagreb in 1976. From 1982 to 1992 she was a staff writer for the "Start" bi-weekly newspaper and news weekly "Danas" (both in Zagreb), writing mainly on feminist issues.

Drakulić's earliest claim to fame was a set of newspaper articles, a novel ("Holograms of Fear" in 1987) and a documentary film about diabetes and requiring a kidney transplant, a condition she was diagnosed with and the experience she had to live through in the 1980s.

Drakulić emigrated from Croatia in the early 1990s for political reasons, after having been declared insufficiently patriotic by several important albeit jingoistic newspapers.Fact|date=August 2008 A notorious unsigned 1992 "Globus" article (Slaven Letica, a known sociologist and writer, subsequently admitted to being its author) accused five Croatian female writers, Drakulić included, of being "witches" and of "raping" Croatia. According to Letica, these writers failed to take a definitive stance against rape as a planned military tactic by Bosnian Serb forces against non-Serbs, and rather treated it in feminist fashion, as crimes of "unidentified males" against women. Soon after the publication, Drakulić started to receive telephone threats; her property was also vandalized. Finding little or no support from her erstwhile friends and colleagues, she decided to leave Croatia.

Drakulić has written for various newspapers and magazines in many different languages, including "The Nation", "La Stampa", "Dagens Nyheter", "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", and "Politiken".

Her noted recent works relate to the Yugoslav wars. "As If I Am Not There" is about crimes against women in the Bosnian War, while "They Would Never Hurt a Fly" is a book in which she also analyzed her experience overseeing the proceedings and the inmates of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague. Both books touch on the same issues that caused her wartime emigration from the home country.

Drakulić currently lives in Stockholm with her husband and regularly visits her home in Croatia.

Bibliography

Fiction

*" Holograms Of Fear (1992)
*"Marble Skin" (1995)
*"The Taste of a Man" (1997)
*" S -a novel about Balkans (also known as: As If I Am Not There) (2001)

Non-fiction

*"Smrtni grijesi feminizma" (1984) only in Croatian
*"How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed" (1991)
*"Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of the War" 1992
*"Cafe Europa: Life After Communism" (1996)
*"" (2005)

Articles

*"We Are All Albanians" (1999) [http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/slavenka_drakulic]
*"Bosnian Women Witness" (2001) [http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/slavenka_drakulic]