Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic died. I was 76

“ Dhe suddenly addressed us”, reported the Croatian daily Jutarnji List, where Slavenka Drakulic wrote articles.

The daughter, Rujana Jeger, also a writer, thanked her condolences, in a message published on her Facebook page, accompanied by a photograph from when she was a child, with her mother: “I will remember her thus, smiling.”

Born in Rijeka, port city in northern Croatia in 1949, Slavenka Drakulic began her career as a writer in the late 1970s, after studying comparative literature and sociology at the University of Zagreb.

He published his first essay, “The mortal sins of feminism”, in 1984, and three years later his first novel, “Hollograms of fear”.

It was one of the first voices to bring the feminist struggle to the public debate in the former Yugoslavia.

In the early 1990s, along with four other authors — Jelena Lovric, Rada Ivekovic, Vesna Kesic and Dubravka Ugresic — Slavenka Drakulic was the target of a misogynistic and nationalist attack. The five were dubbed traitors in an article entitled “Bruxas do rio”, published in Zagreb’s weekly “Globus”.

Slavenka Drakulic lived between Sweden (Stocolmo) and Croatia, his home country, where he died, and had just released a new book, “Why I never learned how to cook”, a work that crosses gastronomy and feminism.

With extensive literary production, Slavenka Drakulic – whose works are translated into more than twenty languages – addresses communism and the end of communism, the rise of nationalism and wars in the Balkans, which followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

The oppression of women goes through his work: between 1992 and 1994 he visited refugee camps on the border between Bosnia and Croatia to learn about the stories of women who had been raped in the context of war.

Recently, when remembering the controversy generated by your essay “The deadly sins of feminism”, published in 1984, Drakulic lamented the slow evolution of women’s rights in Croatia.

“ The themes are the same, the problems are the same, the fight is the same. Violence against women does not diminish and reproductive rights are once again threatened (...). The patriarchy is very tenacious”, warned the author, who romanticized the life of great women, such as Mexican artist Frida Kahlo or Serbian mathematics Milena Einstein.

In addition to collaborating with various Croatian information agencies, Drakulic also wrote to the international press, such as The New York Times, El Mundo, The Nation, or The Guardian.