BLUE MOON

Damir Karakaš

Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać

Winner, English PEN Award

“A story that must be told, no matter the price.”

—Miljenko Jergović

“Karakaš has acquired cult status.” —Jutarnji list

“His novel succeeds in recreating the time pre-catastrophe, the deafening thunderclap which, though beyond our range of hearing, had unimaginable consequences for our psyches.”—Vladimir Arsenić, E-novine

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Damir Karakaš is an award-winning Croatian author, playwright, musician and journalist. Born in 1967 in the remote, mountainous region of Lika, he later studied law and agronomy in Zagreb. During the 1990s he worked as a war reporter from the front lines in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo for national daily newspaper Večernji list. His novels have been translated into French, German, Italian, Czech, Slovak, Macedonian, Slovenian, and Arabic. His plays have been performed across Croatia, Serbia, Germany, Chile and Ivory Coast. Selkies House published his short novel CELEBRATION in 2024.

Ellen Elias-Bursać is an award-winning translator of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, who has served as the president of the American Literary Translators' Association. Between 1972 and 1990 she lived in Zagreb and for six years she worked in the English Translation Unit of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands. Her translation of Karakaš’ novel CELEBRATION was shortlisted for the EBRD Prize in 2025.