Six queer books from the former Yugoslavia, all of them in English
Balkan Pride season ran from June to Belgrade's march on 5 September. Here is what to read now that the sound systems have been packed away — six ex-Yugoslav queer books you can actually get hold of in translation.
Pride season in the former Yugoslavia runs long. It opens in June and closes with Belgrade, which marched on 5 September this year, and by the middle of the month the trucks and the sound systems are gone and the region goes back to the slower business of being queer in it. Balkan Insight marked the end of the season today with a reading list of ex-Yugoslav queer writing available in English — a good prompt, and one we wanted to answer with our own.
We travel through this region often, and the honest difficulty with recommending Balkan queer literature to English-language readers is that so much of the best of it has never been translated. What follows is deliberately short. Every one of these exists in English, and every one can be bought or downloaded without hunting through secondhand listings in a language you may not read.
Lejla Kalamujić, Call Me Esteban
The obvious place to start. Kalamujić is a queer writer from Sarajevo, born in 1980, and this collection of linked short stories — translated by Jennifer Zoble and published by Sandorf Passage in 2021 — circles a daughter grieving her mother while the siege of Sarajevo happens around and after her. It moves between imagined conversations with Kafka, psychiatric wards, cemeteries and small warm apartments. The original won the Edo Budiša prize in 2016 and was Bosnia and Herzegovina’s nominee for the European Union Prize for Literature that year.
It is the rare book about war that refuses the war as its subject. What it is about is who you are allowed to be afterwards.
Suzana Tratnik, Games with Greta & Other Stories
Tratnik has been one of the central figures in Slovenian lesbian writing and organising for three decades, and she is also a translator — she has brought Leslie Feinberg, Judith Butler, Adrienne Rich and Jackie Kay into Slovene. Games with Greta came out in English from Dalkey Archive Press in 2016, in translations by Michael Biggins, Tamara Soban, Špela Bibič, Mojca Šoštarko and Elizabeta Žargi.
The stories share a preoccupation with people who sit at an angle to the mainstream — non-participants, refusers, and the occasional casualty. Tratnik won the Prešeren Foundation Prize, one of Slovenia’s most significant literary awards, in 2007.
Brane Mozetič, Lost Story
Mozetič, born in Ljubljana in 1958, is probably the most-translated openly gay writer to come out of the region, and he has spent a career doing double duty: writing homoerotic poetry and fiction, and editing and translating other people’s — Rimbaud, Genet, Foucault — into Slovene. Lost Story, translated by Erica Johnson Debeljak, came out from Talisman House in 2011. It reads as recovered diary pages from a young man spiralling through club life and drugs, and it is short, hard and unsentimental.
If the novel isn’t your entry point, Talisman has also published his poetry in English — Butterflies (2004), Banalities (2008) — and the fiction collection Passion (2005).
Vera Kurtić, Džuvljarke: Roma Lesbian Existence
Not a novel, and the most important book on this list. Kurtić is a Romani Serbian writer and activist, and Džuvljarke — published in 2014, translated by Ana Zorbić — collects testimony from Roma lesbian women in Serbia about their lives, their families and the specific arithmetic of being invisible in two directions at once. It was the first book to take non-heteronormative Roma women’s sexuality seriously as a subject.
It is also free. The English text is hosted as a PDF by the European Roma Rights Centre, which removes the usual excuse.
Pajtim Statovci, Bolla
Statovci was born in Kosovo in 1990 and taken to Finland at two, and he writes in Finnish — which makes him an edge case on a list like this, and also makes him unmissable. Bolla, translated by David Hackston in 2021, opens in April 1995 with Kosovo on the edge of war. Arsim, a newly married Albanian student, meets Miloš, a Serbian medical student, and the affair that follows is broken by the conflict and then by decades of Arsim’s own self-hatred. The Finnish original won the Finlandia Prize in 2019.
His earlier My Cat Yugoslavia, also translated by Hackston, is stranger and funnier — a young gay Kosovar-Finn, his mother’s migration story, a talking cat, a boa constrictor — and worth reading alongside it.
Aleksandar Hemon, The World and All That It Holds
Hemon is Bosnian, based in the United States since 1992, and writes in English, so this needs no translator. His 2023 novel follows Rafael Pinto, a Sephardic Jewish apothecary from Sarajevo, from the assassination of Franz Ferdinand through the Eastern Front, captivity in Tashkent, and eventually a Shanghai opium den in 1949 — the whole time trying to find his way back to Osman Karišik, the Bosnian Muslim soldier he loves, and to raise Osman’s daughter. It is a love story stretched across the worst half-century Europe could arrange.
Where the gaps are
You will notice what is thin here: very little from Croatia, North Macedonia or Montenegro, almost nothing translated by trans writers from the region, and a heavy tilt towards Slovenia, which has the oldest and best-funded literary translation infrastructure of the six republics. That imbalance is not a reflection of who is writing. It is a reflection of who gets funded to translate, and it is the single most useful thing a reader outside the region can push on — buy the translations that exist, and small presses commission more.
Pride season is over for the year. The books are available all twelve months.
