On the Death of Dževad Karahasan

Suhrkamp Verlag mourns the loss of Dževad Karahasan, who died on May 19, 2023, at the age of 70, in Graz.

Dževad Karahasan, born in Duvno/Yugoslavia in 1953, was one of the most important contemporary European authors. His extensive oeuvre includes novels, essays, short stories and plays and has won numerous awards such as the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding in 2004 and the Goethe-Preis in 2020.

In his works, Karahasan addressed The Siege of Sarajevo (in Dnevnik selidbe (1993), in the essay collection Knjiga vrtova (2001) and in his novels Šahrijarov prsten (1997) and Sara i Serafina (1999)) and wrote about the sometimes fraught coexistence of religions and cultures in his beloved homeland. Most recently, Suhrkamp Verlag published the novel Uvod u lebdenje (Introduction to Floating).
 

»Karahasan erected worlds beyond the grids and the language of contemporary history.«
Lothar Müller, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»His many-voiced and multifarious oeuvre is the expression of a deep faith in the fact that the world can be narrated and thus detoxified.«
Andreas Breitenstein, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»Re-reading Karahasan in the age of seemingly cemented identities is more topical than ever.«
Die Welt

»One of the great contemporary European scholars.«
ORF

»The way he teaches us about the commonalities of the worlds is as though Robert Musil had set out to tell us about One Thousand and One Nights with the most alert of minds.«
Karl-Markus Gauss, Die Zeit

»The open and secret centre of his thought and his narratives remains Sarajevo under siege, as … in his [recent] novel Introduction to Floating.«
Gregor Dotzauer, Der Tagesspiegel

»Hardly any other embodied the ›Bosnian soul‹ – bosanska duša – the way he did.«
Erich Rathfelder, taz. die tageszeitung