Virtual Event with author Damir Karakaš and translator Ellen Elias-Bursac the release of Celebration

Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for a virtual event with author Damir Karakaš and translator Ellen Elias-Bursać to discuss and celebrate the release of Celebration. They will be in conversation with writer Zain Khalid.

With Celebration, Croatian journalist and novelist Damir Karakaš relays an epic in village miniature: the story of a father, a son, a farm, a family dog, and a nation’s descent into fascism.

Mijo, a soldier in the Nazi-allied Ustaša force, has returned to his village at the end of the war. He’s hiding in a hole in the woods, watching as the soldiers who want him dead return again and again to his house, disturbing his wife and children at all hours of the day. If he can just wait long enough, he naively believes, the atrocities of the war and his own involvement in it will be forgotten, and he can have what he really wants: a quiet life farming his land with his family.

How did Mijo become the man we encounter in these pages? By facing poverty? Enduring heartbreak? Nurturing ignorance? Damir Karakaš, a war reporter who witnessed the horrors of the breakup of Yugoslavia firsthand, examines the recent history of an unsettled region in evocative prose, contrasting the beauty of nature against the failings of people. Celebration, translated by the incomparable Ellen Elias-Bursać, traces a dark path—from hapless individual to world-changing catastrophe—in search of a way to break the cycle of political violence.

Damir Karakaš was born in 1967 in the village of Plašćica, Lika, a Croatian region known for strong, winters, wolves, and world inventor Nikola Tesla. For a few years he worked in Zagreb and Split as a journalist, reporting from the front lines of the war in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, then from 2001 through 2007 he lived in Bordeaux and Paris, where he supported himself by playing the accordion. Karakaš is one of the most respected writers in Croatia and the former Yugoslavia, winner of prestigious domestic and international literary awards. He has published seven novels, three short story collections, and a travelog. His novels have been translated into ten languages, including the first translation of a work of Croatian literature into Arabic. The movie of Celebration is currently being filmed by director Bruno Anković under the mentorship of the Polish Oscar winner Pawel Pawlikowski, and will debut in 2024. He is the father of three daughters and currently lives in Zagreb.

Ellen Elias-Bursać has translated Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writing by David Albahari, Svetlana Broz, Slavenka Drakulic, Slobodan Selenic, Antun Soljan, and Dubravka Ugresic. She received the 2006 National Translation Award for Albahari’s novel Götz and Meyer. She taught Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian for ten years in the Harvard Slavic Department.

Moderator Zain Khalid, named a “5 Under 35” honoree by the National Book Foundation in 2024, is the author of the debut novel, Brother Alive. Brother Alive won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book in any genre. Khalid is also the recipient of the 2024 Bard Fiction Prize. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, n+1, The Believer, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and elsewhere. He is an associate editor at The Drift.