The writer and journalist Slavenka Drakulic, one of the most widely translated Croatian authors in the world and a prominent voice against patriarchy and nationalism, died this Saturday at the age of 76, local media reported.
“She left us suddenly,” reported the Croatian daily Jutarnji List, where Slavenka Drakulic regularly contributed articles.
Her daughter, Rujana Jeger, who is also a writer, expressed gratitude for the condolences in a message published on her Facebook page, accompanied by a childhood photograph with her mother: “I will remember her like this, smiling.”
Born in Rijeka, a port city in northern Croatia, in 1949, Slavenka Drakulic began her writing career in the late 1970s after studying comparative literature and sociology at the University of Zagreb.
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She published her first essay, “The Deadly Sins of Feminism,” in 1984, and followed it three years later with her debut novel, “Holograms of Fear.”
She was one of the earliest voices to bring the feminist struggle into public debate within the former Yugoslavia.
In the early 1990s, along with four other female authors—Jelena Lovric, Rada Ivekovic, Vesna Kesic, and Dubravka Ugresic—Slavenka Drakulic was the target of a misogynistic and nationalist smear campaign. The five women were branded as traitors in an article titled “Witches of Rio,” published in the Zagreb weekly Globus.
Slavenka Drakulic lived between Stockholm, Sweden, and her native Croatia, where she passed away just after releasing a new book, “Why I Never Learned to Cook,” a work intersecting gastronomy and feminism.
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With an extensive literary production, Slavenka Drakulic—whose works have been translated into more than twenty languages—addressed communism, the fall of communism, the rise of nationalism, and the Balkan wars that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
The oppression of women was a constant thread throughout her work: between 1992 and 1994, she visited refugee camps on the Bosnia-Croatia border to document the stories of women who had been victims of wartime rape.
Recently, while recalling the controversy generated by her 1984 essay “The Deadly Sins of Feminism,” Drakulic lamented the slow evolution of women’s rights in Croatia.
“The topics are the same, the problems are the same, the struggle is the same. Violence against women is not decreasing and reproductive rights are once again under threat (…). Patriarchy is very tenacious,” warned the author, who also fictionalized the lives of prominent women, such as Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and Serbian mathematician Mileva Einstein.
In addition to collaborating with various Croatian media outlets, Drakulic also wrote for the international press, including The New York Times, El Mundo, The Nation, and The Guardian.
