The Age of Skin and the Epoch of an Author: A Eulogy to Dubravka Ugrešić

Abstract

This text, the initial purpose of which was to review Dubravka Ugrešić’s latest book in English translation, the collection of essays The Age of Skin (2020), unexpectedly transformed into a synthetic writing on the literary and cultural relevance of this great feminist post-Yugoslav author, who passed away suddenly on 17 March 2023. The article analyses the main theses of the book and contextualizes them within Dubravka Ugrešić’s overall text corpus, emphasizing the importance of her essayistic authorial voice—a voice that articulates critical topics of our time, from poverty, exploitation, and violence, to migrations, everyday life mythologies, and popular culture, to melancholic recollections of a better past, together with a utopian future and the possibility of resistance, enabled also by the power and beauty of literature.

Keywords

• dubravka ugrešić
• essayist
• post-yugoslav literature
• feminism