Irena Lukšić

Essays have a special place in the oeuvre of Irena Lukšić. The texts interpret in a unique, almost poetic fashion the phenomena characteristic of the modern times: the culture of celebrities, travels, food and pets. Namely, the author inquires into the said phenomena through the prism of literary works published in the book-series "In the Wake of the Classics" (published in Zagreb as joint project of Croatian Philological Society and Disput), establishing a link with the general state of mind of the post-historical period, but also with her own biographical situation (Diaries, Dream Books, Dictionaries, 2009).

Irena Lukšić (March 10, 1953 - March 11, 2019, Duga Resa) was a Croatian writer, translator, scholar and editor. She was born in a middle-class family, her mother Zora was en economist, and her father Zdenko an administrative lawyer. In her town of birth she completed her primary and secondary education, and she graduated in Comparative Literature and Russian Language from the Faculty of Philosophy at Zagreb University. She also studied journalism at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Zagreb She obtained her doctoral degree with a thesis on Russian emigrants' literature. Her first critical reviews were published in the mid-1970s, in a music magazine. At the time she started collaborating as translator with a number of editions of Vjesnik newspaper. Short stories published in various magazines in the late 1970s marked her literary debut. The year 1981 saw the publication of her first novel Hostel for Train-escorting Personnel, which the literary critics immediately included in the category of so-called prose in jeans, i.e. youthful rebellion against authority and social restrictions. The novel Seeking a Spoon and the collection of short stories Seven Stories or One Life may be said to belong to a similar stylistic formation, while the short-story collection Nights in White Satin (1995) is characterized by a postmodernist view on reality as a game in language. The novel Return of the Broken Arrow (2000), dealing with the war in Croatia, indicates a turn towards reality. Accordingly, the novel Celestial Cyclists (2008) is set in the 1960s and interspersed with documentary material from the sphere of pop-culture, and the book of travel prose Desperately Foreboding Cohen (2013) is based on cultural references important to the 20th century and the literary procédé typical of the adventure genre.