Slavenka Drakulić

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

Slavenka Drakulić was born in Rijeka in 1949 in what was then Yugoslavia, now Croatia. 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).

Drakulić's earliest claim to fame was a set of newspaper articles, a novel ("Holograms of Fear", 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 to the United States of America in the early 1990s for political reasons, after having been declared not patriotic enough by several important newspapers and virtually banned from further publishing.

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

She also wrote several other works, including a book of essays "Deadly Sins of Feminism" (1984), and the novels "Marble Skin", "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), "The Taste of a Man".

Her noted recent works relate to the Yugoslav wars. "As if I am not There" (2000) is about crimes over women in the Bosnian War, while "They would never hurt a fly" (2004) 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.

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