Zoran Ferić

Born 1961 in Zagreb. He graduated Croatian language and literature and works as a professor in gymnasium and is among the most widely read contemporary Croatian writers. His first short stories are being published in newspapers from 1984, but his first collection Mišolovka Walta Disneya (Walt Disney’s Mousetrap) is first published relatively late, in 1996. His second short story collection Anđeo u ofsajdu (An Angel in Offside), published in 2000 received prestigious Ksaver Šandor Gjalski Prize in 2000 and the Jutarnji List Award for the best work of prose fiction. For Walt Disney’s Mousetrap he received the first and the last Dekada Prize founded to praise the fiction written in the past decade. His third book and the first novel Smrt Djevojčice sa žigicama (The Death of the Little Match Girl) is published on 2003. Two years after he publishes his second novel Djeca Patrasa (The Children of Patras). His novel Kalendar Maja (Maya Calendar) is published in 2011 and by then received several Awards – the Jutarnji List Award for the best work of prose fiction in 2011, the annual Vladimir Nazor Award and Kiklop Prize for the best novel of the year.

Na osami blizu mora (Alone by the Sea) is his latest novel published in November 2015.

He is also the author of two collections of newspapers columns: Otpusno pismo (The Letter of Discharge) and Apsurd je zarazna bolest (Absurdity is an Infectious Disease). His novels were translated to English, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Slovenian, Bulgarian and Italian and his short story collections were translated on English, Hungarian, Polish, Slovakian, Spanish and Italian. He works and lives in Zagreb.

Author's titles

Alone By The Sea

VBZ, November, 2015, 341 pages
Excerpt of the novel available in English

Translation rights sold: Germany (Folio Verlag), Serbia (Booka)

Four years after the great literary success of The Maya Calendar Zoran Ferić returns to the scene with the novel that deals with man-woman’s relationships and its peripeteias. But unlike in the voluminous Calendar, here the author doesn’t write the complete life stories of its characters but rather catches them in the key episodes where those lives start to form or refract. The whole is fractured, but the novel is completed and rounded.

An Angel In Offside

Naklada MD, 2000, 174 pages
One short story translated in English
complete translation in German

Translation rights sold: Germany (Folio Verlag), Spain (Baile del sol Ediciones), Ukraine (Folio), Slovenia

Declared as the book of the decade in Croatia while being on bestseller list for more than two years, this extraordinary collection of short stories presents author`s recognizable grotesque world but offering us a more complex and consistent structure.

The Children Of Patras

Biblioteka Premijera, Jutarnji List, 2005, 188 pages
complete translation in German and Italian

Translation rights sold: Germany (Folio Verlag), Italy (Zandonai editore), Slovenia (V.B.Z.)

This novel, with a well-rounded and compact plot, deals with a provocative theme: the love between a forty year old highschool teacher and an ill seventeen year old schoolgirl. Although the theme is somewhat controversial and the relationship essentially comic, Feric writes about the true love; the kind of “funny” or strange love that transcends boundaries, questions moral laws, constantly mocking the tragic nature of death.

The Death Of The Little Match Girl

Naklada MD, 2003, 198 pages
complete translation available in English, German, Italian

Translation rights sold: France (Editions Noir sur Blanc), USA (Autumn Hill Books), Germany (Folio Verlag), Italy (Nikita Editore), Slovenia (V.B.Z.), Turkey (Dora Basım Yayın)

A “Mediterranean Twin Peaks”, this social novel with a distincive crime-plot powerfuly provokes a deeply entranched bourgeois taste but is also an allegory for the atmosphere in the entire country of the 90s as the war and death find their very unispected and unusual ways to present.

The Maya Calendar

Profil International, 2011, 603 pages
40 pages excerpts in English
complete translation in German

Translation rights sold: Germany (Folio Verlag), Bulgaria (Avangard Print)

Considered by many to be Ferić’s best work. A novel of wider scope which incorporates a novel about growing up in Zagreb in the fifties and sixties of the last century, a story about the love between Senka and Tihomir that almost lasts a lifetime and a novel about the sexual revolution in the sixties and the seventies. Ferić covers all aspects of life – happiness, love, sorrow, old age and mortality.

The Travelling Theatre

VBZ, November, 2020, 476 pages

Translation rights sold: Serbia (Booka)

The Traveling Theatre, the fifth novel by Zoran Ferić, a readers’ favorite and one of the most awarded and acclaimed Croatian authors, is an impressive work, a novel that would mark a grand event in any of the great European literatures

A harbour town on the Adriatic serves as a backdrop for dreams which some people use for business, others for films and a few to make their fortune.

Walt Disney’s Mousetrap

Naklada MD, 1996, 124 pages
one short story available in English
complete translation available in German

Translation rights sold: France (Éditions de l’Éclisse), Germany (Folio Verlag), Poland (Pogranicze Sejny), Ukraine (Lavov), Slovenia (…)

Ten stories in Walt Disney’s Mousetrap present Ferić as a brilliant analyst of stupidity, misconceptions, malice and vulgarity. His revelatory stories hit us right there where it hurts the most and where laughter – freezes.