Senka Marić (born 1972) is a Bosnian writer. She is best known for her work as a poet and for her 2018 novel Kintsugi Tijela, which draws from the author's own experiences with breast cancer. Marić is also co-founder and editor-in-chief of the literary journal Strane.

Biography

Senka Marić was born in Mostar, a city in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1972. ^{[1] [2] [3]} She began writing poetry when she was eight years old. ^[4] After finishing secondary school, she studied theater education and comparative literature at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Mostar, and the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo. ^{[1] [2]}

From 1991 to 1997, Marić fled the Bosnian War and lived in the United Kingdom, where she trained as a stylist at the Vidal Sassoon Academy in London. ^{[1] [5]}

After the war, she returned to Mostar, where she now works as a poet, novelist, translator, and journal editor. She runs the online literary journal Strane, which she co-founded in 2014 with Almin Kaplan and Srđan Gavrilović. ^{[1] [3] [5]} Marić, who writes in Bosnian, ^[6] also translates others' writing from English. ^[2]

Marić is a breast cancer survivor, and her work frequently deals with this experience. ^{[4] [5] [7] [8]}

She has published three books of poetry: Odavde do nigdje ("From Here to Nowhere", 1997), To su samo riječi ("These Are Just Words", 2005), and Do smrti naredne ("Until the Next Death", 2016). ^{[1] [2] [4] [9] [7]} Her debut novel, Kintsugi Tijela, was published in 2018; it is based on the author's own experience with cancer, with the novel's narrator reexamining her childhood as she deals with illness and treatment. In 2019, it won the Meša Selimović prize [ bs], a major literary award for novels published in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia. ^{[5] [9] [10]} Kintsugi Tijela has been translated into English by Celia Hawkesworth, and was published by Peirene Press under the title Body Kintsugi in late 2022; it became the first Bosnian winner of the PEN Translates award in 2021. ^{[5] [11] [12]}

Marić has also twice received the Zija Dizdarević short story award, the top prize for short fiction in the country, in 2000 and 2013. ^[1] Critics have counted Marić as part of the first generation of female writers in Bosnia and Herzegovina who are not considered outliers because of their gender. ^[13]

Selected works

• Odavde do nigdje (poetry, 1997)
• To su samo riječi (poetry, 2005)
• Do smrti naredne (poetry, 2016)
• Kintsugi Tijela (novel, 2018)

References