The writer Dubravka Ugrešić, who has died aged 73, disliked borders, and came to think of herself as transnational or even postnational. While in her native Yugoslavia, as it then was, at the age of 22 she published her first work, a characteristically experimental and effervescent children’s book called Little Flame (1971). Fording the Stream of Consciousness (1988) dramatises an international literary conference in which characters from books and their authors turn up to confront scholars who are, in their view, horribly misrepresenting them. Light-footed yet learned, it displays Dubravka’s masterly literary range, expertise, and her love of parody and gift of ventriloquism. The witty, playful, absurdist fictions that followed as her life became more complex won esteem and many prizes.
In the trouble-free days before the former Yugoslavia was consumed in the civil wars of the 90s, she dwelt in opposing worlds, as a strikingly imaginative writer of fiction and an academic at the University of Zagreb, a city that before Yugoslavia’s formation in 1918 had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. She specialised in the Russian avant garde, reading and editing works by writers several of whom had been imprisoned or executed, their works censured and forgotten.
