Yunus Emre Institute
Yunus Emre Enstitüsü – London Meet the Author Series continued with Alen Mešković and Faruk Šehić`s Remembering and Forgetting – the Bosnian War through the literary lens.
Yunus Emre Enstitüsü – London hosted the author Faruk Šehić and Alen Meskovic for the launch of their books Under Pressure (by Sehic) and Ukulele Jam (by Meskovic) which are two novels about the heart-wrenching stories of Bosnian War.
The event that took place on June 7 started with the welcoming speech of the Londra Yunus Emre Enstitüsü Director Dr Mehmet Karakuş.
The author of Ukulele Jam, Meskovic shared the writing procedure of the book and how the idea came up dating years back. Mescovic`s book 𝗨𝗸𝘂𝗹𝗲𝗹𝗲 𝗝𝗮𝗺 is a story of a Bosnian teenager, Miki and his family escaping the Balkan war. They live in a Croatian refugee camp, a former holiday resort on the Adriatic, but it’s difficult to adjust to their new circumstances. With the war rumbling in the background and his brother missing in a Serbian prison camp, Miki and his new friends build an alternative world for themselves where they listen to music and have campfire parties on the beach. Then war breaks out between Croats and Bosnians and friends threaten to become enemies. Miki wants to immigrate to Sweden, but his parents can’t face leaving behind their old life in Bosnia. Based on his own experiences, Alen Meskovic has written a novel which is both humorous and tragic. It is lively, poetic, raw, affecting and very funny, all the while depicting a European tragedy whose consequences still resonate today.
Faruk Sehic, in the introduction of his book Under Pressure also mentioned the adverse effects of war on societies and the ways those societies had to cope afterwards. Sehic said although the war ended, its impacts never faded away from the next generations` lives.
With Under Pressure, Sehic combines beauty and horror to seduce and surprise the reader and secured his reputation as one of the greatest writers to emerge from the region in the post-war period. A war veteran and a poet, Šehić won the Zoro Verlag Prize, 2004 and the EU Prize for Literature in 2013.
The event held in the Yunus Emre Enstitüsü – London exhibition hall ended with a question-answer session and the Londoner book lovers had the chance to discuss the books with the authors from the first hand.