Velibor Čolić
From 17 November to 14 December 2023

Velibor Čolić was born in 1964 in Yugoslavia (present-day Bosnia) and studied literature at university. He was a radio columnist and writer before being conscripted in the army. Following his desertion and subsequent imprisonment in 1992, he fled to France, where he obtained political asylum. He published several books written in Serbo-Croatian, then began writing directly in French. In his first work in French, Archange (Gaïa, 2008), he addresses the atrocities of the war, making his book a memoir and a work of memory. A number of books have followed, all published by Gallimard. In 2014, the Académie française awarded him its Prix du rayonnement de la langue française for his body of work. The Uncannily Strange and Brief Life of Amadeo Modigliani, a “mosaic novel,” is available to English readers; translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth, it was published by Pushkin Press in 2011. The theatrical adaptation of Manuel d’exil by Maya Bösch was awarded the 2022 Swiss Performing Arts Prize.