Rumena Bužarovska

Rumena Bužarovska (1981, Skopje, North Macedonia) is the author of four collections of short stories: Doodles (Čkrtki, 2006), The Eight (2010), My Husband (Mojot muž, 2014), and I’m Not Going Anywhere (Ne odam nikade, 2018); a study of humour in contemporary Macedonian and American short stories, On the Funny: Theories of Humour Through the Prism of the Short Story (2012); and a collection of micro-fiction, Sleep (Spij, 2017).

Her short-story collections have been translated and published in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Slovenia, Italy, Hungary and the United States. In 2016, the Literary Europe Live platform, part of Literature Across Frontiers, included her among the ten most interesting young European writers. In 2017, she received the “Edo Budiša” Award from Istria County for her collection My Husband. She translates from English into Macedonian, including works by Lewis Carroll, Truman Capote, John M. Coetzee, Iain Reid and Flannery O’Connor, and is an Associate Professor of American Literature at the Faculty of Philology in Skopje. She is also a co-organiser and co-author of PitchPlease, an evening of women’s storytelling.

“Bužarovska belongs among the very highest ranks of contemporary female authors – I believe it is entirely justified to assess her in a global context and place her alongside some of the most renowned, for example Anglo-Saxon, female writers such as Alice Munro […] There is such rich material here! She illuminates those dark, painful, carefully shadowed places of human existence – above all, though not exclusively, female existence – in such a way that the reader must be both terrified and enthralled by what they see…”

– Teofil Pančić, on the collection My Husband

“My Husband is a collection of short stories that critically examines patriarchal relationships within the family, particularly the husband–wife relationship, and often the relationship with the child as well. […] In every story in this collection, the woman is in some kind of cage, different each time, but a cage nonetheless. Sometimes that cage can even be gilded, while at other times it is made of the bars of poverty and violence.”

– Bekim Sejranović, on the collection My Husband