Semezdin Mehmedinović

Semezdin Mehmedinović, a poet, essayist and prose writer, was born in 1960 in Kiseljak near Tuzla. He graduated from the Department of Comparative Literature and Library Science at the University of Sarajevo. From 1986 to 1989, he edited the literary magazine Lica and the youth newspaper Valter, and in 1991 he founded the magazine Phantom of Freedom (Fantоm slobode).

He published his first collection of poetry, Modrac, in 1984, followed by Emigrant in 1990. In 1992, he published Sarajevo Blues, which The Washington Post described as one of the best literary documents of the war in Bosnia. The book was translated into English in 1998.

In 2002, Mehmedinović published another collection of poetry, Nine Alexandrias, and in 2009, together with Miljenko Jergović, he published the collection of email correspondence Transatlantic Mail. In the following years, he published The Russian Computer (2011), Self-Portrait with a Suitcase (2012), The Book of Windows (2014), Me’med, Red Bandana and a Snowflake (2017), which earned him the “Mirko Kovač” Award for Best Novel as well as the “Meša Selimović” Award, and This Time Now (2020).

He is also the author of the documentary-fiction film Mizaldo, or the End of Theatre (1994). The film was screened at the Berlin Film Festival that same year, and the following year it received the First Audience and Critics’ Award at the Rome Film Festival.