Photo by Boris Ščitar

Marina Šur Puhlovski

Author

Marina Šur Puhlovski was born in Zagreb on September 20, 1948. She obtained her M.A. in Comparative Literature and Philosophy at the University of Zagreb.

During her youth, she was engaged in journalism, and, for a while, in literary criticism, after which she decided to commit herself to literary writing.

Marina began writing poetry in early childhood, and later, during her studies, she focused on prose. The first story, "Under the Table", was published in 1974 in the Journal of the Croatian Writers' Republika. Since then, she has published stories in numerous literary magazines and newspapers. Her first book, a novel Trojanska kobila (The Trojan Mare) was published in 1991 - just before the outbreak of the war in former Yugoslavia. By 1991, however, she had nine unpublished books, adamantly refusing to fit into the 'postmodernist' generation, then active, close-knit and praised. She openly distanced herself from that circle and pursued her own literary 'voice,' not recognized at the time. "You're not going to publish anything for a long time now," the reviewer of "Trojan Mare" said to her, and so it was like that, indeed. War broke out, everything else was on stand-by.

During the war, however, Marina still published stories in magazines, and Ništarija (A Good-for-Nothing Man), a novel she had written in her youth, was published in two parts in 'Forum' (Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts). It was only in 1996, when she was 48, that her second collection of short stories - written when she was 30 - A Rabbit in the Attic was published. In the following twenty years, she managed to publish all the books 'from her drawer,' publishing one, and even two a year, together with those she was writing alongside - a total of twenty titles. Her novels were always longlisted or shortlisted for prominent Croatian literary awards. Her novel Divljakuša (Wild Woman, translated by Christina Pribichevich-Zoric and published by Istros Books in 2019) won the publishing house VBZ's prize for the best unpublished novel of the year 2018 and soon became a literary bestseller.

Marina's interests are diverse, and apart from six novels and six story collections, she has written and published a collection of songs in prose, two travel books about the Adriatic, a collection of essays on the meaning of literature and the difference between art and sophisticated kitsch, a collection of mini-essays, and several books of mixed genres (travel, journal, aphorisms).