From Nowhere to Nowhere

Overview

Bekim Sejranovic's From Nowhere to Nowhere is a subtle yet unforgettable meditation on the factors that shape identity. The novel's unnamed narrator, raised by his grandparents and scattered to the wind from his hometown of Brcko, Bosnia and Herzegovina, during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, travels to Croatia and Norway, trying to reclaim a sense of self he isn't sure he ever possessed in the first place. From his days playing soccer with friends on Unity Street outside his home to Muslim funerals, his job as an interpreter for Balkan refugees, and his fractious relationships with women, a nomadic aesthetic emerges brilliantly rendering what it means to live a life from which you have always been removed.

Reviews

"But along with the rage and remorse is the exile’s vertiginous feeling of absolute freedom, captured in those exhilarating moments when Sejranović "shook off the dust of memory, ruthlessly, like out of an old carpet." " —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

Author Biography

Will Firth was born in 1965 in Newcastle, Australia. He studied German and Slavic languages in Canberra, Zagreb, and Moscow. Since 1991 he has lived in Berlin, where he works as a translator of literature and the humanities—from Russian, Macedonian, and all variants of the “language with many names,” aka Serbo-Croatian. In 2005–07 he translated for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Firth is a member of professional associations in Germany (VdÜ) and Britain (Translators Association). His best-received translations of recent years have been Aleksandar Gatalica’s The Bekim Sejranovic (1972–2020) was a member of the writers’ associations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Norway. In 2009, he was awarded the Meša Selimovic Prize for the best new novel from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro for Nigdje, niotkuda. In 2011, he was screenplay writer for Japanese director Moku Teraoka’s documentary From Tokyo to the Morava River - A Japanese Meets the Balkans. He lived in Ljubljana from 2011–14, and then lived and worked in Zagreb from 2015 until his untimely death in May 2020.