Writing Against Genocide

Clio's is honored to welcome award-winning writer and war survivor Faruk Šehić to the Bay Area in celebration of his existing and forthcoming work in English translation.

Born in 1970 in Bihać, Yugoslavia, Šehić studied veterinary medicine until war broke out in 1992. The then 22-year-old voluntarily joined the army of Bosnia and Herzegovina and led a unit of 130 men. Gravely injured, he turned to literature at war’s end. It isn’t easy to capture the contradictory tensions of war, let alone survive them: there are silences and blares to account for, precarity and gnawing certainty, hypervigilance and utter carelessness. But Šehić is among a select group of writers who apprehend this ambivalence—through poems, short stories, and novels, as well as in journalism and memoir. He is uncompromising in his commitment to finding words to describe the moments that most resist language.

Join Faruk Šehić—arguably Yugoslavia's biggest fan of Borges, Bowie, and Ginsberg—in conversation with Ena Selimović and antje postema on all things war and metaphor, in and out of translation.

Faruk Šehić is an award-winning author of several books of poetry, short story collections, novels, and—most recently—a memoir. His debut novel Quiet Flows the Una (tr. Will Firth) won the EU Prize for Literature and the Meša Selimović Award, and his short story collection Under Pressure (tr. Mirza Purić) won the Zoro Verlag Prize. Critics consider Šehić the leader of the “beat-up generation” of writers born in 1970s Yugoslavia. His books have achieved cult status across the region, and appear widely in translation. Šehić is based in Sarajevo and works as a columnist and journalist for the acclaimed political magazine BH Dani and radiosarajevo.ba.

Ena Selimović is a Yugoslav-born writer and translator. Her work has appeared in Words Without Borders, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, ANMLY, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from the American Literary Translators Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her translation of Maša Kolanović’s Underground Barbie appeared with Sandorf Passage in 2025. She holds a PhD in comparative literature.

antje postema teaches Yugoslav language and culture in the Slavic Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her main research interests include literature and film from Yugoslavia and its successor states, cultural memory studies, and theories and representations of trauma in literature and art. She is a founding member of the Berkeley-Stanford chapter of the New Yugoslav Studies Association.