Death in the Museum of Modern Art

Alma Lazarevska is a Bosnian prose writer and graduate of the Faculty of Philosophy (University of Sarajevo). Her home town is mentioned in the title of a collection of her essays, Sarajevo Solitaire. It is the setting for her novel The Sign of the Rose, which has been translated into French and German. The stimulus for the novel was the murder of Rosa Luxemburg. Her books Death in the Museum of Modern Art (translated into French and German) and Plants are Something Else (the title story has recently been included in an edition of the magazine Wasafiri) deal with siege, and a 'besieged city' without naming it. Her story 'How we Killed the Sailor', translated by Celia Hawkesworth, was included in an anthology of women writers from East and Central Europe: Voices in the shadows: women and verbal art in Serbia and Bosnia.

"Lazarevska's intelligence and imagination in 'Death in the Museum of Modern Art' make it a brilliant, engaging work of fiction." Aleksandar Hemon "I say that one writer is already great, and if not [already] great, will be great - Alma Lazarevska - With a few metaphors, tremendously powerful ones, she says it all - " Abdulah Sidran, novelist. "Lazarevska's deceptively simple and spare style is perfectly suited to the un-showy, non-indignant gradual reveal of horrors. The translation by Celia Hawkesworth closely captures the delicate nuances of the original: nearly every sentence is imbued with double meaning, so much is left unsaid. There is a poetic silence between sentences, between trains of thought, mimicking perhaps the silence after mortar attacks. The stories will reward close reading or, better still, close re-reading. Death may be the first word in its title, but the book is really about the triumph of life." Necessary Fiction, reviewed by Marina Sofia "This is an important collection of stories, the tales from a part of the world that we rarely see literature translated, taking place during an important time in world history. This year we had Hassan Blasim's "The Iraqi Christ" taking out the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize with Judge Boyd Tonkin saying, "a decade after the Western invasion and occupation of Iraq, that country's writers are exploring the brutal and chaotic aftermath of war and tyranny with ever-growing confidence." Similarly in this work of short stories, we have Alma Lazarevska using "fearless candour and rule-busting artistry", slightly surreal, slightly cryptic but with the siege of Sarajevo always bubbling in the background." Review from Messenger's Booker (and more)