I was born in Dubrovnik, "pearl of the Adriatic" and grew up in Napoli, Dubrovnik and Sarajevo, where I lived until 1992, when the war started. After spending three years of war in the besieged city, and working as a translator, journalist, manager of the British Council Center, as well as Susan Sontag’s assistant on the production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, I moved to Bari, Italy in 1995, and then to Toronto, Canada in 1996. 

I've translated novels, philosophical essays, poetry and short stories from English into Bosnian (among others, works by Saul Bellow, Lawrence Durrell, Richard Rorty, Susan Sontag, Bernard Malamud, Sylvia Plath, Joyce Carol Oates and Joseph Heller). My translations of Bosnian poetry were published in Salmagundi, TLS, The Paris Review, Canadian Forum, Exile etc. I also translated films and dramas for Sarajevo television and for the stage.

My writing appeared in magazines in former Yugoslavia, as well as Poetry Today, Meta, Gastronomica, Descant, PRISM International, BBC Radio and Radio Netherlands. "The Unbearable Lightness of Wartime Cuisine", a memoir about food during wartime, was included in The Gastronomica Reader, edited by Darra Goldstein and published by University of California Press. My novella, The Sea, was published in 2010 by Quattro Books.

Like so many other artists, I’ve had to have daytime jobs to make sure that my children and I had a shelter and food on the table. Most of my life I’ve worked in the arts administration, event management and education. Even though full-time jobs have slowed down my output, they have never impacted my imagination and curiosity. They didn’t make me rich, but they have enriched my life with knowledge of many things that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise and, most importantly, by bringing many incredible people into my life.

It doesn’t really matter how the story of my life goes, or how I can interpret my love of languages, food, travel and people I meet along the way. Over the years, I’ve realized that my origins are much broader than both my real and my imaginary ones (which may include Spain, a flamenco dancer and a poet), as I kept discovering new languages, new artists, new media, musical genres and many wonderful people, places and things. Now I am a little bit from everywhere and that makes me feel very privileged.

In short, I was born and I am living to the best of my abilities, with all the usual ups and downs that life bestows upon us. And a few not so usual ones, but those have found their way into my writing, so I’ll just leave them there.