SENKA MARIĆ

Senka Marić was born in Mostar in 1972. She began writing poetry at the age of eight. After completing secondary school, she studied theatre education and comparative literature at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Mostar and the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Sarajevo.

From 1991 to 1997, she left Bosnia and Herzegovina to escape the war and lived in the United Kingdom, where she trained as a stylist at the Vidal Sassoon Academy in London. After the war, she returned to Mostar, where she currently works as a poet, novelist, translator, and magazine editor. She runs the online literary magazine Strane, which she co-founded in 2014 with Almina Kaplan and Srđan Gavrilović.

She has published three books of poetry: From Here to Nowhere (Odavde do nigdje, 1997), They Are Just Words (To su samo riječi, 2005), and Until the Next Death (Do smrti naredne, 2016). Her debut novel, Kintsugi of the Body (Kintsugi tijela), was published in 2018. It is based on the author’s own experience with cancer. In 2019, the novel received the “Meša Selimović” Award, a major literary prize for novels published in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Kintsugi of the Body is currently being translated into English.

Senka Marić has also received the “Zijo Dizdarević” Short Story Award, the major prize for short prose, twice, in 2000 and 2013, when she was also awarded the first European “Knight of Poetry” Prize. Critics have placed Senka Marić among the first generation of Bosnian and Herzegovinian women writers who, because of their gender, did not find themselves on the margins of the literary scene.