CORTO LITERARY AGENCY Rights Guide Frankfurt 2016 | 5 CONTENTS Corto Literary Agency Corto Literary Agency ....................................................... 3 Corto Literary Agency represents some of the best and most prestigious writers from South-Eastern Europe, i.e. the Balkans. It is a territory of diversity; an intersection Ivana Bodrožic´ .................................................................. 4 of various cultures, traditions, and practices, a territory that pulsates with creativity and variety. Žarko Lauševic´ .................................................................. 7 Our mission is to choose only the finest and the most valuable in our pursuit to bring this talent closer to the international reading audience, to contribute to the Zoran Pilic´ .......................................................................10 open world of new stories, new voices and new ideas that can enrich and change us. Besides representing authors from the Balkans, Corto Literary also works as a Ivica Djikic´ ......................................................................14 sub-agent for publishers and literary agencies abroad on Eastern European markets. Drago Glamuzina .............................................................19 Our main objective is to match the right publishers with just the right titles and thus contribute to the greater success of our clients. Zoran Feric´ ......................................................................23 We serve as a mediator in the translation and publishing of the books from the Balkans abroad and vice versa, but we’d also be willing to offer our active support Rumena Bužarovska .........................................................30 and help in any aspect of our client`s work. Aleš Cˇ ar...........................................................................33 Davor Mandic´ ..................................................................37 6 | CORTO LITERARY AGENCY Ivana Bodrožić Rights Guide | 7 Ivana Bodrožić HOTEL TITO Profil International, 2010, 188 pages THE PIT • 15-pages long excerpt in English • complete German, French and Danish translation Naklada Ljevak, Balkan Noir edition, February 2016, 216 pages Bestselling and award-winning poet and novelist, Ivana Bodrožić, Translation rights sold: USA (Seven Stories Press), Germany (Hanser), France (Acte Sud), Denmark through the genre of political thriller, boldly engages to unmask (Tiderne Skifter), Hungary (Libri), Czech (Paseka), Slovenia (Modrijan), Serbia (Rende), Macedonia (Ma- one’s transitional society, deeply imbued with crime and corrup- gor), Turkey (Aylak Adam) tion. Ivana Bodrožić describes the banality of war. Her debut novel is This intelligent, dramatic, powerful, tragic, menacing and dark, but the deeply unsettling story of a young girl growing up in times above all brave novel, opens up with a prison scene. Journalist Nora of conflict who nevertheless clings to hope and courage through- Kirin arrives in an unnamed Croatian town chasing a story of a local out. high school teacher who, along with her underaged lover, murdered her husband. An intriguing, agonizing and dark story about a family The girl is nine years old when she is sent to the seaside in the sum- tragedy and a scorned woman leads into a series of parallel narratives mer of 1991 – but the holiday turns into a timely escape, because war colliding in the nether regions of this deeply divided city. One of the breaks out in her hometown of Vukovar while she’s away. And her fa- major narrative lines leads Nora to her father’s murderer, who got killed ther has disappeared without trace... The voice of the young narrator is around twenty years before, on the eve of the war, while acting as a deft and engaging as she unfolds the story of the life that follows in a mediator in negotiations between enemy sides and warning them that refugee camp that was formerly an elite public school. She will spend the conflict might be intentionally provoked. the next six years of her life there, cooped up in a single tiny room with The novel is set at the time when bilingual boards were being placed on public institutions in a her mother and brother. Their living quarters might be cramped, and town where human victims still make the most profitable trade deals. The movers and shakers of each of the exiles in the camp has suffered their own trauma, but at least there’s always company and all processes are the same people who were actively involved in war crimes during the 90s, corrupt life is never dull. Here the girl makes new friends and lives through the vicissitudes of puberty – from politicians, surviving mobsters, warlords who, almost twenty years later, converted into members of her first visit to the disco and her first kiss to her first drink and the inevitable hangover. She also has the local political and social elite. to contend with the worries of her mother, a woman who never allows her proud standards to slip, as This atmospheric novel about a town without a name is infused with lyrical parts and filled to the well as her brother’s rage as he relentlessly petitions the president. And every day she hopes to hear brim with diverse characters bursting with life and credibility, which takes her impressive prose to a someone bring her the news that she so longs to hear – that her father is still alive. level of a universal study of human nature. Hotel Tito is a formidable document of self-assertion – humorous, adroit and without the slightest REVIEWS AND PRAISES: trace of false sentimentality. Seen through this young girl’s eyes, the harsh reality of war appears in a completely different light. The Pit is a masterful refection of one country’s reality, a septic pit in which crime, false war merits and actual profiteering, political menace cloaked in cheap patriotism, bloodstained secrets of recent past and hypocrisy coming from those offering a bright future, are being fermented and accumulated. It is a novel REVIEWS AND PRAISES: created by skillfully combining press clippings from crime chronicles and high-profiled politics in which, Ivana Simić Bodrožić has written a novel of one’s epoch. It is the most what a writer can do and one of the similarly to the Croatian reality, everything is mixed in the same blender producing a revolting nauseating main meanings of literature in general. spew. Ivana Bodrožić takes the bull by the horns, dealing with subjects considered taboo as well as the MILJENKO JERGOVIC, A WRITER sacred cows, by placing them in a familiar setting, not only geographically, but also within the time coor- dinates we usually call – our reality.” Reading this novel has moved me deeply. DRAGO HEDL, WRITER JANNE TELLER, A WRITER Developed as a classic thriller in which the murders are multiplying, this novel represents the devastation the war has left behind, a good 15 years after it had nominally ended on the territory of the Republic of Croatia. The most important thing to emphasize is the representation of a collective downfall which is equal on both sides, the one which participated in the aggression and the one that defended itself from this aggression. The worldview which this narrative constructs is quite literally a hole, a pit in which the corpses that were slaughtered in horrible ways on Ovčara are buried together with the remains of our collective humanity. Its magnetic power is gargantuan, so much so that it transforms into a cosmic black hole which swallows all of us and turns us into non-humans, creatures without morality. And that is this war’s greatest defeat. Both the aggressors and the victims are left without any possibility of redemption, without any chance of love which has always been the only path into the future. VLADIMIR ARSENIć, LITERARY CRITIC 8 | CORTO LITERARY AGENCY Rights Guide | 9 Ivana Bodrožić Žarko Laušević Ivana Bodrožić, born in 1982 in Vukovar, attended secondary school in Zagreb and got her Master’s degree in Croatian studies and philosophy at the Zagreb University. A YEAR MAY PASS BUT THIS DAY NEVER ENDS: A JAIL DIARY Her debut poem collection First Step into the Darkness, published 2005, earned her the Goran Prize for Young Poets, a prestigious literary award for young Novosti Publishing, 2011, 448 pages poets, and the Kvirin Prize, an award for best poets under the age of thirty five. Her poetry has been published in various literary magazines (Vijenac, Quorum, • 30 pages excerpt in English Poezija) and included in anthologies of modern Croatian poetry as the young- est author. Her poetry has been translated into various European languages Translation rights sold: Croatia (Profil), Slovenia (Modrijan Založba), Macedonia (Tri Publishing) and the integral poem collection First Step into Darkness was translated into Spanish. The novel Hotel Zagorje (published in 2010, Profil publishing) received When you kill a man, you cease to be free. the following honours: The life of the writer and actor Žarko Laušević (1960), the movie • Josip and Ivan Kozarac Award star of Yugoslavia’s theatre and film industry and – at the mere age • Kočić’s feather, Banja Luka – Belgrade (for outstanding achievement in modern literature) of thirty – the winner of some of the most prestigious national • Kiklop – for the best work of fiction in 2010 awards, suddenly turned upside down in the year 1993. when he • Prix Ulysse for the best debut novel for translated fiction was involved in a fight in Podgorica (Montenegro) where he killed In February 2012, The German translation of Hotel Zagorje was