Her work exposed communism, nationalism and violence against women.
ZAGREB, Croatia | June 2026
Croatian writer and journalist Slavenka Drakulić has died at the age of 76, leaving behind one of the most influential bodies of work on feminism, communism and the wars that destroyed Yugoslavia. A close friend confirmed that she died on Saturday in Croatia. Her novels and essays were translated into more than 20 languages and introduced international readers to the intimate consequences of political systems. She became known for examining history through kitchens, hospitals, bedrooms and the lives of women.
Born in the port city of Rijeka in 1949, Drakulić studied comparative literature and sociology at the University of Zagreb. She began her literary and journalistic career during the final decades of socialist Yugoslavia, when public discussion of gender inequality remained restricted by official claims that socialism had already emancipated women. Drakulić challenged that assumption by writing about domestic labor, sexuality, motherhood, illness and economic dependence. Her work helped bring feminist analysis into a public sphere still shaped by communist ideology.
Her first essay collection, The Deadly Sins of Feminism, appeared in 1984 and established her as a provocative voice in Yugoslav journalism. The book questioned why women continued carrying unequal burdens despite formal legal equality and widespread participation in the workforce. Rather than relying only on theoretical language, she examined ordinary experiences that revealed the persistence of patriarchy. Her approach made feminism understandable through daily life rather than presenting it as an imported academic doctrine.
Drakulić published her debut novel, Holograms of Fear, three years later. The book reflected themes that would remain central throughout her career, including the body, vulnerability, illness and the fear of death. She frequently used physical experience to challenge political abstraction, showing how institutions enter the most private areas of human existence. Her writing moved easily between journalism, memoir, fiction and social criticism.
International recognition expanded with How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, a collection describing life under Eastern European socialism through objects and routines often ignored by official history. Drakulić wrote about shortages, household products, food, clothing and the exhausting work expected from women. These details exposed the distance between ideological promises and lived reality. Her humor prevented the book from becoming a simple denunciation, while its precision gave readers outside the region access to a complex social world.
The collapse of Yugoslavia transformed both her subject matter and personal life. As nationalism intensified during the 1990s, Drakulić opposed the political narratives that divided former neighbors into ethnic enemies. Her writing examined how propaganda, fear and collective grievance could turn ordinary people toward intolerance and violence. That position made her a controversial figure at a time when public loyalty was often measured through nationalist language.
In Balkan Express, she documented the psychological disintegration that accompanied the wars. The essays focused not only on military events but also on disrupted friendships, exile, suspicion and the sudden disappearance of a shared country. Drakulić understood that war changes language and memory before it permanently changes borders. Her work preserved the emotional confusion of people watching familiar institutions collapse around them.
Her novel As If I Am Not There confronted sexual violence committed during the war in Bosnia. Through the experience of a woman held in a detention camp, the book explored rape as a weapon of domination and terror. Drakulić refused to treat women’s suffering as a secondary consequence of war. The novel became one of her most widely discussed works and reinforced her reputation for addressing subjects many societies preferred to avoid.
She later turned her attention to alleged war criminals appearing before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. In They Would Never Hurt a Fly, she examined defendants not as distant monsters but as people who had once occupied ordinary social roles. The essays investigated how neighbors, officials and professionals could become participants in organized cruelty. Her central question concerned the banality of evil and the mechanisms through which personal responsibility disappears inside collective violence.
Women’s bodies and lives remained constant subjects in her fiction. Drakulić wrote works inspired by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and Mileva Marić Einstein, the first wife of Albert Einstein. These books examined pain, creativity, marriage, invisibility and the ways women’s intellectual and artistic identities can be overshadowed by famous men. She used historical figures to continue the feminist inquiry that had defined her earliest journalism.
Her essays appeared in major international publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, La Repubblica and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Writing for audiences across Europe and the United States, she became an important interpreter of post-communist societies. She resisted simplistic divisions between a democratic West and a backward East, emphasizing the disappointments that followed the collapse of socialism. Her work questioned both communist authoritarianism and the inequalities produced by the economic order that replaced it.
Drakulić also wrote openly about aging, disease and mortality. These themes were never separate from politics because she understood the body as the place where public systems become personal realities. Medical dependence, physical pain and fear could reveal forms of vulnerability hidden by ideological language. Her writing remained unsentimental while preserving compassion for people living through circumstances they could not control.
In 2025, the Croatian Journalists’ Association honored her with a lifetime achievement award. During that period, she described journalism as testimony, resistance, analysis and the pursuit of truth. She distinguished literary creation from reporting but said both were united by her need to write. The statement summarized a career in which artistic expression and public responsibility continuously reinforced each other.
Drakulić lived between Croatia and Sweden, maintaining a position both inside and outside the societies she analyzed. That distance allowed her to observe the Balkans without abandoning emotional attachment to the region. She wrote as someone shaped by Yugoslavia, displaced by its collapse and unwilling to accept the official myths created afterward. Her perspective remained personal without becoming narrowly autobiographical.
Her death removes one of the most persistent literary witnesses to the transformations of Eastern and Southeastern Europe. She showed that political history is incomplete when it excludes domestic life, gender, illness and individual fear. By placing women at the center of communism, war and nationalism, she changed how those experiences could be narrated. Her books will endure because they reveal that the largest systems are ultimately experienced through individual bodies and private lives.
Writing becomes resistance when silence protects power. / La escritura se convierte en resistencia cuando el silencio protege al poder.