Monday 5 July 2010

Adnan Mahmutović: An Introduction

I first met Adnan Mahmutović in 2006 as a fellow Ph.D. student at the Karlkrona Summer School for Literature and Literary Theory at Blekinge Tekniska Högskola (Eng. Blekinge Institute of Technology). At the time, I did not really know anything about his writing (apart from a few odd poems he showed me, all of which, I shamefully admit, have fled my memory since), but we nevertheless connected over a mutual love of comics, and have kept in touch.

Mahmutović was born in 1974 in Banja Luka in northern Bosnia and migrated to Sweden as a refugee in 1993. He has a dual citizenship as a Bosnian Swede, and currently teaches immigrant literature and a course on Love and its Discontents at Stockholm University during the day, while working with people with mental disorders at night.

As I write this, he is no longer a Ph.D. student but has earned his full-fledged doctorate in English literature with his dissertation Ways of Being Free: Authenticity and Community in Selected Works of Rushdie, Ondaatje and Okri, and he has by now three books of fiction to his name: [Refuge]e (a miscellany published via Konstfack University in 2005), Illegitimate (a novella published as an e-text by Cantarabooks in 2009) and Thinner than a Hair (a full-fledged novel published by Cinnamon Press earlier this spring). In addition to this, he has also written the script to a short film, Gusul (Eng. Washing), which has now been filmed. The experience of the shoot, which involved his own grandmother in one of the central parts, is beautifully discussed by him in a blog post from January this year, over at Under the Midnight Sun.

At any rate, I have decided to spend July taking a closer look at Mahmutović: the Scriptwriter (12 July), the Author (19 July) and the Scholar (26 July) respectively. It is also worth mentioning that Mahmutović is currently out on a Thinner than a Hair Blog Tour and that my own upcoming post of 19 July will be part of this tour.

The full Thinner than a Hair Blog Tour is as follows:
21 June, PaulaZone by Paula Phillips.
28 June, "The Graces" Sagas by Kathryn Magendie.
5 July (i.e. today), Advancing Poetry by Caroline M Davis.
12 July, How to Write a Novel by Tom J. Vowler.
19 July, this very space by yours truly.
26 July, TaniaWrites by Tania Hershman.
2 August, Nik's Blog by Nik Perring.
9 August, Snow like Thought by Rachel Fenton.
16 August, Not Exactly True by Valerie O’Riordan.
23 August, Vanessa Gebbie's News by Vanessa Gebbie.

1 comment:

  1. I love you blog tag - hop over to mine to read the musings of an equally Mad Finn. I'll be back for the Adnan Mahmutović blog tour - I found you through Tom's blog.

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