Josip Novakovich

Josip Novakovich, a short-story writer, novelist and writer of narrative essays, was born in 1956 what is now Croatia and grew up under the authoritarian rule of Marshal Tito near the Hungarian border in the central Croatian town of Daruvar. He studied medicine in Serbia, and then moved to America, where his mother had been born, and continued his studies, in psychology and then in creative writing, at Vassar College and at Yale. He lives in Montreal, where he teaches creative writing at Concordia University, and he has recently taken Canadian citizenship.

His three short-story collections, Yolk, Salvation and Other Disasters and Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, all contain work that is darkly comic. He is known in particular for his depiction of violence, and for his writing about the Yugoslav war and its atrocities. His writing has been notably published in America, and Keith Botsford in The Republic of Letters praised him for “an economy of style and narrative that all good readers will relish.”