Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić to receive prestigious Vilenica Prize

Ugrešić, 67, is a literary historian and a sharp and lucid writer of novels and essays, in which she interweaves public and private, East and West and politics and cultures.

In 1993, the author left her homeland because of her critique of the nationalistic sentiment in Croatia and now lives in Amsterdam. As she puts it, she "exists in an inter-space and lives in no man's land", head of the Vilenica jury Lidija Dimkovska told the press in Ljubljana on Wednesday.

Ugrešić for instance analysed the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia from different angles in The Culture of Lies (1998) collection of anti-political essays and wrote about how a lie becomes the supreme truth in Thank You for Not Reading (2003).

"Author Ugrešić never turns a blind eye to anything," the prize jury wrote as it explanated why to award her.

"In the last few collections of essays...