Slavenka Drakulić, born in Croatia (former Yugoslavia) in 1949, is a journalist and a writer whose books have been translated into many languages. Her best-known book in the USA is How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. Her last collection of essays, Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism, was published by Penguin Random House in January 2021. In the USA, she has published eight non-fiction books and five novels. In 2010 Slavenka’s book S. – A Novel About the Balkans made it into a feature film As If I Am Not There by Juanita Wilson.
In her fiction Slavenka Drakulić has touched on a variety of topics, such as dealing with illness and fear of death in Holograms of fear; the destructive power of sexual desire in Marble skin; an unconventional love affair in The taste of a man; the cruelty of war and rape victims in S. A Novel About the Balkans. In her novel Optužena (The Accused), Slavenka writes about the not often addressed topic of child abuse by her own mother.
In three novels about creative women living with powerful men (Frida Kahlo, Dora Maar and Mileva Einstein) Slavenka deals with domination and balance of power between partners.
A fictionalized life of Frida Kahlo in Frida’s bed shows how the fragile Frida never gives up on painting.
In Dora i Minotaur (Dora and the Minotaur: My Life With Picasso) Slavenka writes about Dora Maar and her turbulent relationship with Pablo Picasso, and how it affected Dora’s identity as an artist.
Mileva Einstein, teorija tuge (Mileva Einstein, the theory of sorrow) is a novel written from the point of view of Albert Einstein’s first wife Mileva Maric. Motherhood and financial and emotional dependence on Einstein took her away from science and professional life.
In the book of stories Nevidljiva žena i druge priče (Invisible Woman and other stories), Slavenka writes about the taboo of women’s aging.
Slavenka Drakulić has also published six non-fiction books. Her main interests in non-fiction include the political and ideological situation in post-communist countries, war crimes, nationalism, feminist issues, illness and the female body. In How We Survived Communism and even laughed; Balkan Express and Café Europa she deals with everyday life in communist and post-communist countries. Café Europa Revisited paints a picture of Eastern Europe, thirty years after the end of communism.
Slavenka wrote the history of communism through the perspective of animals in A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism. She explores evil in ordinary people and choices they make in They Would Never Hurt a Fly – War Criminals On Trial In The Hague, about the people who committed crimes during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. On the other side, in Flesh of her flesh, Slavenka writes about the ultimate good – people who decide to donate their own kidney to a person they have never met. Her first book, Deadly sins of feminism (1984) is available in Croatian only. It was reprinted in 2020, together with additional feminist texts, under the title Smrtni grijesi feminizma – ogledi o mudologiji.
Slavenka is a contributing editor in The Nation (USA) and a freelance author whose essays had appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine and The New York Review Of Books, as well as in Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), Internazionale (Italy), Dagens Nyheter (Sweden), The Guardian (UK), Eurozine and other newspapers and magazines.
Slavenka Drakulić is the recipient of the 2004 Leipzig Book-fair ”Award for European Understanding.” She lives in Sweden and Croatia.