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He mediated between West and East. Now the award-winning writer has died at the age of 70.
The Bosnian writer Dzevad Karahasan died in Graz at the age of 70. The Suhrkamp publishing house announced this on Friday, citing the family of the deceased.
Karahasan is considered one of the most important contemporary writers, who gave a voice to Bosnia-Herzegovina with its complex history.
Escape from Sarajevo
He was born in 1953 in the Bosnian-Yugoslav town of Duvno (now known as Tomislavgrad). The son of Muslim parents studied literature and theater in Sarajevo and Zagreb. The Bosnian capital was to become the center of his life.
He once described Sarajevo as the place of his destiny. In 1992, during the course of the collapse of Yugoslavia, he held out for about a year in besieged Sarajevo before he managed to escape.
Works about Bosnia’s history and beyond
Karahasan accepted guest lectureships and professorships in Germany and Austria. From 1996 to 2003 he was city clerk in Graz. In recent years he commuted between Sarajevo and the Styrian capital.
Many of his books have been translated into German, including The Eastern Divan (1993), The Book of Gardens (2002), Reports from the Dark World (2007) and The Consolation of the Night Sky (2016). In his last novel «Einführung des Schwebens» (2023), he focuses on the siege of Sarajevo, which he experienced himself.
“If I had tried to write down the atrocities of the war, the terrible, the unbearable, I would not have been a normal person at the end of the siege,” Karahasan told SRF in February 2023.
A number of his novels and essays tell of earlier Islamic civilization in Bosnia and beyond. Karahasan has received numerous awards, including the Leipzig Book Prize in 2004 and the Goethe Prize of the City of Frankfurt in 2020.