A Muzzle for Witches

Winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature

As with the rest of her literary career, Dubravka Ugresic’s final work, A Muzzle for Witches, is uncategorizable. On its surface, the book is a conversation with the literary critic Merima Omeragic, covering topics such as ＂Women and the Male Perspective,＂ ＂The Culture of (Self)Harm,＂ and ＂The Melancholy of Vanishing.＂

But the book is more than a simple interview: It’s a roadmap of the literary world, exploring the past century and all of its violence and turmoil--especially in Yugoslavia, Ugresic’s birth country--and providing a direction for the future of feminist writing.

One of the greatest thinkers of the past hundred years, Ugresic was one-of-a-kind, who novels and literary essays pushed the bounds of form and content, and A Muzzle for Witches offers the chance to see her at her most raw, and most playful.

Dubravka Ugresic is the author of six works of fiction, including The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, and six essay collections, including the NBCC award finalist, Karaoke Culture. In 2016, she was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature for her body of work. She went into exile from Croatia after being labeled a ＂witch＂ for her anti-nationalistic stance during the Yugoslav war. She lived in the Netherlands until her passing in March 2023.

Ellen Elias-Bursac has been translating novels and non-fiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers for thirty years, including writing by David Albahari, Neda Miranda Blazevic Kreitzman, Ivana Bodrozic, Svetlana Broz, Slavenka Drakulic, Dasa Drndic, Kristian Novak, Djurdja Otrzan, Robert Perisic, Igor Stiks, Vedrana Rudan, Slobodan Selenic, Antun Soljan, Dubravka Ugresic, Karim Zaimovic.