Daša Drndić (10 August 1946,
Zagreb – 5 June 2018,
Rijeka) was a
Croatian writer. She studied English language and literature at the
University of Belgrade.
[1]
The author of a number of books, Drndić is best known for her award-winning novel
Sonnenschein (2007) which has been translated in many languages. It appeared in English translation under the title
Trieste; the translator was
Ellen Elias-Bursać. It was nominated for the
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. An earlier novel,
Leica Format, was translated by Celia Hawkesworth.
[2]. In 2017, her penultimate novel,
Belladonna, was published in English by
New Directions Publishing (also translated by Hawkesworth).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daša_Drndić
Daša was born in Zagreb, when Croatia was part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, into a middle-class family of intellectuals. Her mother, Timea, was a psychiatrist and her father, Ljubo, who had been a wartime partisan, later became a diplomat, serving as ambassador to Sweden and Sudan. He raised his family in both Serbia and
Croatia. Daša studied philology at the University of Belgrade, before winning a Fulbright scholarship to the US, and taking a master’s in theatre and communications at Southern Illinois University.