Dubravka Ugresic was one of Europe’s most distinctive novelists and essayists. Her writing has been compared to that of Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Milan Kundera and Virginia Woolf, and has been translated into more than thirty languages. When war broke out in the former Yugoslavia in 1991, Ugresic took a firm anti-war stance, becoming a target for nationalist journalists, politicians and writers, which led her to leave Croatia in 1993. Ugresic was the winner of several major literary prizes, including the Austrian State Prize for European Literature 1998; Jean Améry Essay Prize 2012 and the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She lived in Amsterdam.