Dragica Rajcic and Ljiljana Pospisek
Photo: Yves Noir
Dragica Rajčić was born in Split, Croatia, in 1959. She publishes poetry and short prose. She came to Switzerland for the first time in 1978, where she began to write texts in German. Her first volume of poetry in German, ‘Halbgedichte einer Gastfrau’, was published in 1986. After returning to Croatia in 1988, she worked as a journalist before coming to Switzerland a second time in 1991, following the outbreak of war in Croatia. She has published five books and three theatre plays and has devoted herself to humanitarian work and public relations on the war in Croatia. She has been honoured with the Adalbert von Chamisso Prize and the Merano Poetry Prize, among others. No other author with a non-German mother tongue works so radically with fragments of language and situates her texts so exposedly at the boundaries of her own language. She studied creative writing in the USA (IWP Iowa and University of Kentucky, Lexington) and has taught in Switzerland and Croatia, including at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel/Bienne (HKB) and at schools.
Photo: Peter Hunziker
Ljilja Pospisek, born in 1976, lives and writes in Schaffhausen and Bern. In 2019, she won the Swiss Autobiography Award. Some of her texts consist of mosaics of images, scenes that are linguistically composed in a way that seems to be documenting the memory process itself. A search for happiness, flashing up in poetic images. An attempt to give moments of remembrance both their space and their justification. In spring 2020, she will take up a scholarship from the City of Schaffhausen’s cultural sponsorship programme for a four-month residency in the Belgrade studio.
Project
There are different ways to look back on one’s life. One of them is to write an autobiography. The text ‘Krokodil im Flieder’ was a kind of memoir that did not adhere to a linear sequence of time. And how could it? Memory is as independent as a bird: it comes and goes. Sometimes it appears in sharper contours, sometimes it is blurred, pale and as if shrouded in mist. The autobiography was an attempt at reconquest. Reclaiming one’s own history, one’s origins and, as a result, the attempt to re-position oneself in the present. ‘Krokodil im Flieder’ was in the process of being finalised with the aim of finding a publisher.
