Belgrade Noir

Aleksandar Gatalica was born in 1964 in Belgrade. He graduated with a world literature degree in Ancient Greek from the University of Belgrade’s Faculty of Philology. He is a writer, critic, and translator, best known for his novel The Great War, winner of the NIN Award for Best Serbian Novel of the year. His works have been translated into more than ten languages.

Misha Glenny is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. His best-selling nonfiction book McMafia was translated into thirty-two languages and was broadcast as a BBC and AMC fictional TV drama series. A former BBC Central Europe correspondent, Glenny won the Sony Gold Award for Outstanding Contribution to Broadcasting for his work during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. His books include The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804–2011 and

The Fall of Yugoslavia.

Vesna Goldsworthy was born in Belgrade in 1961 and has lived in England since 1986. She is a best-selling writer, academic, and broadcaster. Her books have been translated into twenty-three languages. Her novel Gorsky, serialized on the BBC, was a Waterstones’s Book of the Year and a New York Times Editors’ Choice in 2015. Monsieur Ka, which imagines the life of Anna Karenina’s son, was a London Times

Summer Reads for 2019.

Kati Hiekkapelto was born in 1970 in Oulu, Finland, and has lived in Kanjiža, Serbia. She is a crime writer, punk singer, and performance artist. The protagonist of her novels is Detective Anna Fekete, a Hungarian born in Serbia who fled to Finland as a child during the Yugoslav Wars. Her novels have been translated into fifteen languages, and in 2015 she won the Clew of the Year Award, presented by the Finnish Whodunnit Society for the best Finnish crime novel of the year.

Milorad Ivanović is a Serbian investigative reporter and editor. He was editor in chief of the Serbian edition of Newsweek, and executive editor of the daily paper Blic and the weekly publication Novi Magazin. Presently he is an editor at BIRN Serbia in Belgrade. He has a special interest in cross-border journalism and is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. His investigations have included work on human trafficking, Balkan mercenaries in Iraq, and clinical trials.

Miljenko Jergović was born in 1966 in Sarajevo, Bosnia. He published his first article in 1983, and his first book of poetry, Warsaw Observatory, in 1988. He has written several collections of short stories and a dozen novels. In 2012, he received the Angelus Central European Literature Award and in 2018 he won the Georg Dehio Book Prize. His stories and novels have been translated into more than twenty languages. Jergović currently lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia.

Aleksi Koponen is an opera singer and translator who has previously worked as a script reader and literary editor. He lives in London.

McKenna Marko is a graduate student of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Michigan currently residing in Budapest, Hungary. Her research interests include Hungarian and Yugoslav literature, film, and culture. She translates from Hungarian and Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian.

Vladan Matijević was born in 1962 in Čačak, in central Serbia. He served in the Yugoslav People’s Army in the territory of present-day Northern Macedonia. He has published twelve books, has received various awards, and has been translated into several languages. His novels Very Little Light

and The Adventures of Mace Aksentijević were both especially successful in France. He lives in Serbia, on the outskirts of a small, gloomy town, and does not like guests.

Nataša Milas was born in 1976 in Sarajevo. She is a scholar of Russian and South Slavic literature and film, and a translator from Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Milas edited a special issue of the literary journal Absinthe 20: New European Writing, focusing on Bosnian prose. Her translation of Muharem Bazdulj’s novel Transit, Comet, Eclipse was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2018. Milas lives in New York City and teaches at New York University.

Genta Nishku is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Michigan and holds a graduate certificate in critical translation studies from the same department. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Balkan literatures, as well as activism and resistance. She translates from Albanian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, and Italian.