About the Author

Bojan Babic was born in Belgrade in 1977. He studied at the Department of Serbian and World Literature at the Faculty of Philology, in Belgrade, and later gained a Master's degree from the same department. Before commencing his studies in Serbian and World Literature, he was a singer in a little-known heavy metal/grunge band. Over the last ten years, he has worked as a prolific and acclaimed copywriter and associate creative director at a big advertising agency, winning numerous awards. Bojan Babic began writing in the middle of the last decade of the twentieth century (when the war in the former Yugoslavia was raging), in his teenage years and early twenties. In that period, he wrote and published two books: Noises in prose - hermetic poetry with "delicate language tendencies and surreal stoicism in a world with no hope", and PLI-PLI, a book of flash-fiction. What motivated him to start writing was an inability to cope with the situation of absolute violence and destruction all around him, on the one hand, and his youthful fascination with the poets of the French, German and Soviet avant-garde, on the other. Those first attempts thus came about as a result of activism and escapism at the same time. Ever since he took his first steps in writing, he has been concerned by questions that are still dominant themes in his literature today: irreparable harm, a loss of faith in the idea that things can get any better, a pessimism about history and civilization which, over time, turns into anthropopessimism, a loss of belief in human kind. These and many other questions have, in various ways, from various perspectives and using various poetic strategies, arisen in Babic's books. With no definite answer. As one critic wrote of Babic's novel Inhuman comedy, realistic prose seems too feeble and naïve to describe the unbelievable reality that is happening to us, hence Babic uses surreal tactics to talk about it. If one had to come up with a name for it, it would be called dystopic surreal realism, in which he always adds a pinch of dark humor, irony and an oneiric atmosphere. Critics have compared his prose to that of Don DeLillo, Boris Vian and Roberto Bolanjo. Babic won an award from the Borislav Pekic Foundation in 2011. His novel Illegal Parnassus, published in 2013, was shortlisted for the biggest national literary award, the NIN prize; it was also shortlisted for the biggest regional award (for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and Serbia) - the Mesa Selimovic prize. Critics have reacted very strongly to his last three novels. He has appeared as a guest teacher in several creative writing schools. He has had prose, poetry and essays published in a large number of magazines and anthologies in Serbia and abroad.