Tanja Lucic teaches at the University of Amsterdam and lives on the edge of the city's red light district. She and her pupils, fleeing the violent break-up of their homeland Yugoslavia, have found temporary refuge in the Department of Slavonic Languages. Desperate to make ends meet, many of the students find work at the 'Ministry' a fetish-wear factory in North Amsterdam. Meanwhile, Tanja and her student Igor form a dangerously close relationship that threatens to unleash all the tensions of life in exile. With her sharp and melancholy observations, Dubravka Ugresic illuminates with savage compassion our shared human homelessness.
Author Biography
Dubravka Ugresic works have been translated into many languages. She has been compared favourably with writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Milan Kundera and Virginia Woolf, and was recently awarded Italy's prestigious Premio Letterario prize for best foreign author. She entered self-imposed exile when Croatia's late president, Franjo Tudjman, proclaimed Croatia to be 'Paradise on Earth' in the early 1990s. Michael Heim has translated many famous works of European literature, including The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kis, Death in Venice by Thomas Mann and The White Plague by Karel Capek. He translated Dubravka Ugresic triple prize-winning novel Fording the Stream of Consciousness in 1991.
