Faruk Šehić was born in 1970 in Bihac. He grew up in Bosanska Krupa, which was still part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Until the outbreak of war in 1992, Šehić studied veterinary medicine in Zagreb. However, the then 22-year-old voluntarily joined the army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which he led a unit of 130 men as a lieutenant. After the war he studied literature and, since 1998, has created his own literary works. Literary critics regard him as one of the most gifted young writers in the former Yugoslavia, a shining light of the so-called “knocked-over generation”.
As in Šehić’s debut, the poetry collection Pjesme u nastajanju (Acquired Poems, 2000), most of his other works include the subjective experience of the war as a focus. The prose in his short stories is sober. Without judgement, he depicts the everyday experience of war, the brutal events, but also weaves in natural observations of the soldiers. Every detail is valued, be it the death of a comrade or the sight of birds on a power line. The unsettling effect of the stories unfolds through this ironic juxtaposition. Šehić knowingly uses authenticity as a rhetorical device, saying, “my readers should hate the war.” His anti-war stories do not make the claim that they reflect the experiences of an entire generation – though possibly that constitutes the cult factor of his work. Šehić, whose oeuvre is not restricted to examination of the war, has had his books translated into English, German, Bulgarian and Macedonian.
The collection of short stories Pod pritiskom (Under Pressure, 2004) was awarded the Zoro Verlag Prize. His debut novel Knjiga o Uni (The Book of Una, 2011) was awarded the Meša Selimović prize for the best novel published in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia in 2011. Šehić, who lives in Sarajevo, is a member of the Writers’ Association and the PEN Centre of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and he works for the magazine BH Dani as a columnist and journalist.
