Spaces Measured with Words: An Interview with Alma Lazarevska

Abstract

I came across Alma Lazarevska's writing in Sarajevo Notebook and, intrigued, I searched for her short stories. I was fascinated by her crisp, amiable prose that reaches deep and far from the once-besieged city. Alma Lazarevska is a Bosnian-Herzegovinian columnist, essayist, and prose writer. She lives in Sarajevo, where she studied comparative literature and theatre studies at the Faculty of Philosophy. Lazarevska is the recipient of the Dušan Timotijević Yugoslav prize for her essays (1986) and the BiH Association of Writers prize for her short stories (1996). She published a collection of essays Sarajevski pasijans (1994), a novel U znaku Ruže (1996) as well as two collections of short stories —Smrt u Muzeju moderne umjetnosti (1996) and Biljke su nešto drugo (2002). Some of her short stories from Plants Are Something Else have been translated by Cynthia Simmons in 91st Meridian and Absinthe, and Celia Hawkesworth in Wasafiri. We spoke via e-mail in June and July of this year.