Selection 9.28.51 AM

Spomenka Štimet, a Croatian writer, is known for her book "Croatian War Nocturnal." The book, which combines fiction and memoir, explores her experiences during the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It reflects on the horrors of war and also examines the role of language and utopian projects, like Yugoslavia and Esperanto, which ultimately failed to live up to their ideals. So, Spomenka Štimet is a writer from Croatia. She writes primarily in Esperanto and in her native Croatian and Croatian War Nocturnal is one of her most famous and most important books. It's a thin book, a fictionalized memoir of her experiences during the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s when Yugoslavia broke down into several states and Croatia emerged as an independent state from Yugoslavia and in many ways it's a meditation not just on this horrific experience of war, it's also a meditation on language and on these utopian projects that define so much of the 20th century, so much of her life, Yugoslavia, in her case Yugoslavia and Esperanto and how these projects, these utopias fail to come to fruition, fail to live up to their promise in the real world.