Dubravka

The writer Dubravka Ugrešić, who has died aged 73, disliked borders, and came to think of herself as transnational or even postnational. While in her native Yugoslavia, as it then was, at the age of 22 she published her first work, a characteristically experimental and effervescent children’s book called Little Flame (1971). Fording the Stream of Consciousness (1988) dramatises an international literary conference in which characters from books and their authors turn up to confront scholars who are, in their view,…

I discovered that Dubravka Ugrešić had died last month, aged 73, in that strange, uniquely modern way one does: by noticing a sudden proliferation of quotes from her works on Twitter. For a moment I could suspend the sadness and scroll through her sharp-witted wisdom. But there was a darker irony to the scene – one that Ugrešić, a writer all too attuned to the impoverishment of literature in the name of consumption, would have found quite amusing. Visit her website and the text that greets you reads: “Who knows, maybe one…