Croatian · b. 1975
Ivana Sajko is a Croatian writer and theatre director, born in Zagreb in 1975. She works as a playwright, novelist and essayist, and she directs her own productions. Her plays have been staged and translated across Europe, and she has often combined text, performance and political commentary in a single work. Her novel Love Novel (Rovinski ljubavni roman), translated into English by Mima Simić and published by Biblioasis in 2022, follows a couple under economic and emotional strain. It won the HKW Internationaler Literaturpreis and was shortlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award. Earlier prose includes Rio Bar. Her work addresses war, precarity, family life and the pressures of contemporary capitalism, and it has made her one of the more visible Croatian authors of her generation outside the Balkans.