Slavenka Drakulić

Drakulić was born in Rijeka, Croatia (at that time, part of socialist Yugoslavia), on July 4, 1949. 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. In addition to her novels and collections of essays, Drakulić's work has appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Internazionale, The Nation, La Stampa, Dagens Nyheter, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Eurozine, Politiken and The Guardian.[2] She is a contributing editor for The Nation.[3] She lives in Croatia and in Sweden.

Drakulić temporarily left Croatia for Sweden in the early 1990s for political reasons during the Yugoslav wars.[4] A notorious unsigned 1992 Globus article (Slaven Letica 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 allegedly planned military tactic by Bosnian Serb forces against Croats, and rather treated it 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.[5]

Her noted works relate to the Yugoslav wars.[6] 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. In scholarly circles, she is better known for her two collections of essays: "How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed" and 'Cafe Europa'. These are both non-fiction accounts of Drakulić's life during and after communism.

Her 2008 novel, Frida's Bed, is based on a biography of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.

Her 2011 book of essays, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism: Fables from a Mouse, a Parrot, a Bear, a Cat, a Mole, a Pig, a Dog, & a Raven, was published by Penguin in the US, and was widely reviewed to great acclaim.[7] The book consists of eight reflections told from the point of view of a different animal. Each beast reflects on the remembrance of communism in different countries in Eastern Europe. In the second-to-last chapter, a Romanian dog explains that under capitalism everyone is unequal "but some are more unequal than others", an inversion of a famous George Orwell quote from Animal Farm.[8]

In 2021, Drakulić published a new essay collection, Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism, which reflected on the continued divisions between Eastern and Western Europe even thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The title of this book refers back to the two essay collections she published in the 1990s, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (1992) and Café Europa: Life After Communism (1997), and attempts to take stock of the last three decades of changes. Drakulić writes about the bitter disappointments felt by many East Europeans who expected that the revolutions of 1989 would usher in a new era of democracy and prosperity. Instead, the essays in this collection reveal that East Europeans still feel like second class citizens. In her chapter discussing what she calls "European food apartheid," Drakulić describes how investigators found that Western corporations sold lower quality products in the East under the same brand names and packaging they use in the West: fish sticks with less fish in them and biscuits made with cheaper palm oil instead of butter.[9] Drakulić also ruminates on the persistence of post-communist nostalgia in the region, as people try to grapple with both the positive and negative legacies of their collective pasts. She writes, “In all former communist countries in Eastern Europe, it is difficult to mention the merits of communism, a system that, in a short time, brought modernization and changed an agrarian society into an urbanized, industrial one. It meant general education as well as the emancipation of women; this has to be recognized, even though such changes were accomplished by a totalitarian regime.” [10]

Drakulić lives in Stockholm and Zagreb. In 2020, she contracted a severe case of Covid-19 and was hospitalized for twelve days in an intensive care unit, six of which she spent on a ventilator.[11]

• The official Slavenka Drakulic Site
• Slavenka Drakulic Interview 2009
• Slavenka Drakulic receives the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding
• Extract from "Two Underdogs and a Cat"
• Slavenka Drakulic speaking at Festivaletteratura 2009 - Scintille: La leggenda del Muro di Berlino
• Public lecture by Slavenka Drakulić: “Intellectuals as Bad Guys? The Role of Intellectuals in the Balkan Wars' May 15–19, 2014, Kyiv Ukraine: Thinking Together
• Book Talk by Slavenka Drakulić: Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism, Harriman Institute at Columbia University, April 5, 2022