Adisa Bašić
area: Literature
Key Facts
nationality
Bosnia and Herzegovinaarea
Literatureresidence
Sarajevorecommending institution
BMEIAtime period
August 2016 - September 2016Poet and journalist Adisa Bašić was born in 1979 in Sarajevo. She has a degree in Comparative Literature and Librarianship and a master’s degree in Human Rights and Democracy. She has published four poetry collections, Eve’s Sentences (1999), Trauma Market (2004) and A Promo Clip for My Homeland (2011) and Motel of Unknown Heroes (2014). Her poems have been included in all recent anthologies of Bosnian poetry.
She is an Assistant Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at the Department of Comparative Literature and Library Science, Sarajevo Faculty of Philosophy. For a number of years, she has been contributing to BiH weekly Slobodna Bosna, also running her regular column of literary criticism.
She has spent a year in Marburg, Germany, studing German Language and Media Studies. Twice she toured the United States with other writers (Writers in Motion) and had a bumpy train ride through the Balkans during the Word Express. Her story To Survive Hitchhiking was featured in a compilation of stories that won the UNESCO competition Bun(t)ovna p(r)oza in 2001, and in 2011 she won the third prize in Zija Dizdarević contest for her story Driving Home for Christmas. For a poetry collection A Promo Clip for My Homeland she has received an international award Literaris Bank Austria 2012: the book was translated into German and published at the Wieser Verlag. In the summer 2012 she participated as a Bosnian representative in the Festival "Poetry Parnassus" organized in London, on the occasion of the Olympics.
She read her poetry with great joy in many different places: at the prestigious Poets House in New York, at Harvard, at socialist Nazim Hikmet Cultural Center in Istanbul, under a Tuareg tent near the small town of Lodéve in Provence, at various bookstores and pubs, at Zagreb Močvara, in Tešanj, Banja Luka, outside the library in Gradačac, at the UT Connewitz in Leipzig, at Belgrade poetry festival Pesničenje…
My plan is to write an essay which waits for years to be written. My great-grandfather Bećir died as Austro-Hungarian soldier when my grandfather was a baby. That largely determined the later lives of our entire family. My grandfather grew up without a father, as an orphan, he had no one to learn from how to be a good father. When he got his family, he was violent with his son, my father. The death of just one soldier is so transgenerational present till today. My brother himself was the soldier in the last war and he is very interested in the fate of our great-grandfather Bećir. On the Internet he found a list of Austrian soldiers awarded with medal and the name of our grandfather on that list. We're not quite sure that it was him, I should investigate all that in the Viennese military archives. My brother thinks that the heroic death is a good thing, he is proud of our great-grandfather. I would like Bećir to be a deserter rather then a hero. These two opposing points of view, my brother's and mine, this is something I'd like to write an essay about. An essay about the great-grandfather who fought for the empire of which he knew nothing. I want to write about people who justify war and glorify him, and about those who think that there isn’t any good reason for war, ever.