The third title in the series of audiobooks by local authors translated into English brings a story dedicated to Croatia's "lost generation" — a gritty, fast-paced novel Farewell, Cowboy by award-winning Croatian writer Olja Savičević Ivančević.
Dada’s life is at a standstill in Zagreb. She’s involved with a married man, working a dead-end job, and even the parties have begun to feel exhausting. When her sister calls her back home to help with their aging mother, she doesn’t hesitate to leave the city behind. She arrives to find her mother hoarding pills, her sister chain-smoking, her long-dead father’s shoes still lined up on the steps, and the cowboy posters of her deceased brother Daniel still on the walls.
Hoping to free her family from the grip of the past, Dada vows to unravel the mystery of Daniel’s final days. This debut novel by poet and novelist Olja Savičević Ivančević explores a beautiful Mediterranean town's darkest alleys: the bars where secrets are bought, the rooms where bodies are sold, and the streets, plains, and houses where blood is shed. By the end of the long summer, the lies, lust, feuds, and frustration will reach a violent and hallucinatory climax.
Farewell, Cowboy received the Tportal Best Croatian Novel Prize (2011), the Prix du premiere Award for the best debut novel translated in French (2020), and the Jure Kaštelan Award. It was adapted into a successful stage play. An excerpt has been included in Dalkey Archive's Best European Fiction 2014 and won her a place at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
"Dazzling, funny and deadly serious, this perfectly pitched novel about the legacy of the Yugoslav war heralds the arrival of an exciting new European voice." - The Guardian
"In Dada’s wild amalgam of quest story, social satire, and comic shtick (plus a surreal film-shoot scene featuring cowboys), you won’t catch Savičević offering tidy diagnoses. You won’t mind, thanks to prose that glints like the sea in the distance." — Ann Hulbert, The Atlantic
"Farewell, Cowboy is a novel about the here and now but told in a universal way that is not solely intended for the average frustrated Eastern European. If Farewell, Cowboy is a novelistic poem, for which there are quite convincing arguments, then Olja Savičević Ivančević is the prose equivalent of Ennio Morricone." — Maša Kolanović
"Strange and unsettling, poetic and imaginative, confusing but captivating: Farewell, Cowboy was named the best Croatian novel of 2010 (The Tportal Award for the Best Croatian Novel 2011). The nonsense and poetry, combined with Dada's introspective account of the world around her, make this story a deeply engaging read. This book is interesting, unusual, and unique; it defies expectations and keeps readers in a fog, on their toes, sharing Dada's quest for closure." — Olivia Rose, Booksa.hr
Olja Savičević Ivančević is a poet, writer, journalist and book editor from Split, Croatia. Her writing has been translated into thirteen languages and published in fifteen countries across Europe and in the USA. Individual poems and stories have been translated and published in about forty languages. She was awarded the Prozak prize for her manuscript To Make a Dog Laugh, and is the recipient of the Ranko Marinković Prize for the best short story in 2007, as well as the Kiklop award for her poetry collection Kućna pravila.The novel Singer in the Night won the Libar za vajk award at the Pula Book Fair, as well as the English Pen Award. For the novel Summers with Marija, she was awarded the 2023 City of Zagreb Award, as well as the Štefica Cvek Award for feminist and socially engaged literature. Short films based on Olja's stories have received numerous awards, and the story "Fags" from the collection To Make a Dog Laugh was adapted into the graphic novel Summer. She lives and works in Zagreb and Korčula.
Celia Hawkesworth taught at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL, from 1971 to 2002. She was shortlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize 2018 and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2018, won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2018. EEG won the Best Translated Book Award in 2020 and the AATSEEL Best Literary Translation Prize in 2021. Her translation of Ivo Andrić’s Omer Pasha Latas won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize in 2019.
Publication of this audiobook was cofunded by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia.