Take Six: Six Balkan Women Writers, book launch at LBF 2023

19/04/2023

Take Six: Six Balkan Women Writers, published by Dedalus Books (United Kingdom, April 2023) and edited by Will Firth, brings together six unique female voices: Magdalena Blažević (Bosnia and Hercegovina), Tatjana Gromača (Croatia), Vesna Perić (Serbia), Natali Spasova (North Macedonia), Ana Svetel (Slovenija) and Sonja Živaljević (Crna Gora).

We invite all to join the book launch, to be held during the London Book Fair, on Wednesday, April 19th at 6:30 pm. 

This compilation of prose – classic short stories, travel writing, diarylike accounts and stand-alone chapters from a hard-hitting novel – has been translated by Will Firth and Olivia Hellewell. It is the newest addition to Take Six series of women's prose anthologies Dedalus Books launched in 2018, and Croatian authors Magdalena Blažević and Tatjana Gromača are featured with five texts.

Tatjana Gromača (Sisak, 1971) is an award-winning Croatian author, whose works have been translated into several languages including English, Italian, German, Polish, Slovenian. Last year she published a travel prose collection Berlin, Pula, Warsaw (Sandrof, 2022) – and parts have been included in the Take Six compilation. These literary walks, infused with the author’s recognizable ironic-philosophical style, follow her journey, and paint a picture of Croatia within its Central European and Mediterranean context.

Magdalena Blažević (Žepče, 1982.) received several awards for her short stories, which have been translated into English, Russian and Macedonian. Some are included in her collection Festival (Fraktura, 2020), and just recently she published her first novel In Late Summer (Fraktura, 2022).

The editor of this collection and its main translator, Will Firth (1965), is an Australian literary translator who lives and works in Berlin. He studied German, Russian, Croatian and Serbian at the Australian National University in Canberra, completed postgraduate studies in South Slavic studies at the University of Zagreb and Russian philology at the Pushkin Institute in Moscow. He translated the works of M. Krleža, M. Crnjanski and various Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Macedonian and Bosnian authors.