Mallow Colour Of Nothing

Mallow Colour Of Nothing

Feral Tribune, 2007, 140 pages

Mallow Colour of Nothing is a collection of three stories (Green Castle; Please, Try and Sleep; As Nothing Ever Happened), in part relying on the Đikić’s novel regarding a subject that is once more, but not always directly, connected to the war; the narrative style here is focused on changes of narrative division, time perspectives and certain inherited traditions of oral Bosnian storytelling. 

“War is the subtext of each story. I’m aware that it becomes a bit tiring and boring, but that war completely changed who I am and I still have the urge to talk about it. It was the most influential moment of my life. I don’t see it as an obsession or weakness and I’m not writing for therapeutic purposes. It’s not something I want to get rid of. It is the way of articulating some inner need that makes me want to write. (…)
Everything I write is some kind of autobiography. Each character has something of mine, one of my emotions. Each sentence has something of mine. It is completely irrelevant whether these  events actually occurred. It is important that the book consists of something of mine that is not real – not characters and events, but atmosphere and ambience. The thing that stands behind the sentences and happens inside the mind of a reader – is me.”

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Meet The Author

Ivica Đikić

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Naklada Ljevak, 2014, 136 pages
20-page excerpt available in English

Set in one winter night, beginning with the arrival of a more or less unexpected passenger and ending with one of the most poetic scenes in contemporary Croatian literature, Repetition has the discursive traces of a love story, a detective story and an elegy of the victim’s character but it cannot be classified in any of the aforementioned categories; it has a story on its own. 

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Naklada Ljevak, 2011, 256 pages
complete translation available in German and Spanish

Translation rights sold: Spain (Sajalin Editores), Germany (Kunstmann Verlag), Hungary (Europa Konyvkiado)

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Feral Tribune, 2003, 110 pages
complete translation available in Spanish and Italian

Translation rights sold: Italy (Bottega Errante), Spain (Sajalin Editores), Bosnia and Herzegovina (Civitas), Serbia (with other stories, Red Box)

A political and romantic saga that covers the end of a century which tragically announced the beginning of a new era in the Balkans. Written is prose typical of the best of Bosnian writers – as the Nobel prize winning author Ivo Andrić – in its method of storytelling, in its creation and development of character, its consistent plot and specific sense of calm when presenting even the most disturbing content. 

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Naklada Ljevak, April 2016, 246 pages
60-pages excerpt available in English

Translation rights sold: Norway (Solum|Bokvennen), Italy (Bottega Errante), Sweden (Ramus), Czech Republic (Albatros)

Outstanding and unflinching documentary novel that follows the events that took place in the course of the three days and nights (between 13 and 16 July 1995) during which almost eight thousand Bosniaks were killed in the area of Srebrenica. The intention of this non-fiction novel is to research and to understand, using literary means, how was it possible for a JNA officer, raised in the spirit of Yugoslavia and genuinely devoted to the Yugoslav ideal and Titoism, to take charge of the operation to kill eight thousand people based exclusively on their ethnicity and religion.