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IVANA BODROZIĆ was born in Vukovar, Croatia, in 1982, where she lived until the Yugoslav Wars started in 1991. That year her father disappeared while fighting for Croatian independence and she and the rest of her family moved to a refugee hotel in Kumrovec. In 2005, she published her first poetry collection, The First Step into Darkness, and in 2010 her acclaimed and bestselling first novel The Hotel Tito, which won three major awards in Croatia and the Prix Ulysse for Best Debut Novel in France. It was published by Seven Stories in 2017. Since then Bodrozic released her second poetry collection, A Crossing for Wild Animals, and a short story collection, 100% Cotton. We Trade Our Night for Someone Else's Day, published by Seven Stories in 2021, is her second novel and her first political thriller. Sons, Daughters, Bodrozić's third novel, marks another step in a new direction. ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAC translates fiction and nonfiction from Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. She has taught in the Harvard University Slavic Department and is a contributing editor to Asymptote. She has translated both of Ivana Bodrozić's previous books for Seven Stories along with Robert Perisic's novel No-Signal Area. She lives in Boston.
"""In Ivana Bodrožić’s third novel, freedom often comes at the cost of forgetting—forgetting war and those lost to it, forgetting a life before transition, forgetting life itself for the simulacrum of it. Each character is locked into a body, to history, to a manner of living they would never choose, loosened only occasionally by their desperate attempts to escape these bonds. These characters twine together, giving us a fractured view of lives broken by violence and isolation, while reminding us of the cacophony of love, imperfect and brittle as it may be, that we leave in our wakes."" — Alex DiFrancesco, author of Transmutation"
