Yesterday's People

Goran Simic: Goran Simic was born in Bosnia in 1952 and has been living in Toronto since 1996. He has published eleven books of poetry, drama, and short fiction, including the acclaimed volume of poems in English translation, Sprinting from the Graveyard (Oxford University Press, 1997). In Canada, Simic has published Peace and War, a limited edition volume gathering poems by himself and by Fraser Sutherland; other books of his poetry and drama have been translated into nine languages. His poems are included in anthologies of world poetry, such as Scanning the Century (Penguin, 2002) and Banned Poetry (Index, 1997). He has received major literary awards from PEN USA and four times in former Yugoslavia.

"In Yesterday's People, Goran Simic looks at war, and its aftermath, from the ground level. His characters are everyday people who rarely seek to understand, and have no power to influence, the larger forces that have trapped them, either in the war-torn present or long after the war has ended and they have moved halfway around the globe; they're too busy trying to make sense of their own shattered lives."&#8212Three Percent,University of Rochester "Simic successfully composes epitaph and testimony to a people and a place that the newspapers indeed forgot with the start of a new war elsewhere. His writing is a living bridge negotiating the shadow between now and then, here and there, the experience of war and its expression."&#8212Good Reports "...[Goran Simic] recalls figures such as Isaac Babel and Vladimir Mayakovsky, who suffered through similar disillusionments and produced works that went beyond historical documentary, leaving works of art that are as frightening as they are compelling..."&#8212The Globe and Mail