Saša Stanišić

Saša Stanišić (born 1978 in Višegrad) is a Bosnian-German writer who works in German. He belongs to a generation of authors born outside Germany for whom migration and the memory of the Balkan wars are central subjects. His career shows how the experience of exile can become literature.

He was born in Višegrad, in eastern Bosnia, to a Bosniak mother and a Serb father. In 1992, at fourteen, he lived through the siege of his town during the Bosnian War, and soon after his family fled to Germany, settling in the south of the country. In Heidelberg he completed school, where his teachers encouraged his interest in writing. He then studied at the University of Heidelberg, graduating in Slavic studies and German as a second language. Later he taught in the United States, at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.

His early texts, published in the early 2000s, were short and experimental. His breakthrough came with the novel How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (2006), originally published in German as Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert. It won numerous prizes in Germany and abroad and has been translated into more than thirty languages. His recurring concerns are identity, family memory and what it means to belong to a place, handled with a prose that mixes humour and seriousness without melodrama.

In 2019 he won the German Book Prize for Where You Come From, a novel about his origins and his family's history. That same year he publicly criticised the decision to give the Nobel Prize in Literature to Peter Handke, citing Handke's support for Slobodan Milošević. His legacy lies in contemporary German literature, where he has helped widen the idea of who can write in German and from which experiences.