Miha Mazzini

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Miha Mazzini
Miha Mazzini.jpg
Miha Mazzini
Born (1961-06-03) 3 June 1961 (age 62)
Jesenice, PR Slovenia, Yugoslavia
OccupationNovelist, screenwriter, film director, columnist
NationalitySlovenian
Alma materUniversity of Ljubljana, Ljubljana
Period1981 to present
GenreNovel, Short story, Film
Notable works Guarding Hanna , The Cartier Project , King of the Rattling Spirits
Website
www.mihamazzini.com

Miha Mazzini (born 3 June 1961 in Jesenice, Yugoslavia) is a Slovenian writer, screenwriter and film director with thirty published books, translated in ten languages. He has a PhD in anthropology from the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis and has MA in Creative Writing for Film and Television at The University of Sheffield. He is a Voting member of the European Film Academy.

Contents

Biography

His childhood took place in a unique atmosphere, with a grandmother who was seeing ghosts and souls, angels and the devil, and a mother who admired communist dictators and ruled cruelly over her only subject, her son. He described his childhood in Titoist Yugoslavia, in three novels. The protagonist of the 2002 novel King of the Rattling Spirits (based on his 2001 Sweet Dreams film script) is 12 years old and in the 2015 novel Childhood the protagonist is five. In the third novel "It's Personal" (2022) the protagonist sums up his childhood and the consequences it left him with.

His first novel Crumbs (American title The Cartier Project) was set in his hometown of Jesenice and published in 1989 and sold 54,000 copies. It won the government award for the best novel of the year and Mazzini won the award for excellent artistic achievement by a young writer, given by the opposition. That was highly unusual for the times when Yugoslavia started slowly breaking apart. [1]

He was the first Slovenian writer to write a novel about the erased, people who lost all of their rights and legal status after the declaration of the country's independence in 1991. Later he adapted the novel for the feature film Erased.

His historical novel Paloma Negra deals with Yu-Mex music in the 1950s, when Yugoslav singers started mimicking the songs and music they've seen in Mexican films. During the research for the novel, Mazzini recorded the stories told by protagonists and made a documentary called Yugoslav Mexico (YuMex). [2] The novel German Lottery is set in the same era but deals with swindlers, illusions and unreliable protagonists.

Work

Genre

Mazzini introduced in the post-1990 Slovene literature a tough protagonist, characteristic of Noir fiction, in his novel Guarding Hanna .

Awards

His Cartier Project was the all-time best-selling novel in Yugoslavia. It won the 1987 Best Novel of the Year award from both the pro-government and opposition newspapers.

Later his work was selected for many international anthologies, recently his short story Mother was included in Contemporary European Fiction anthology and short story Avro Lancaster in Best European Fiction 2018 anthology.

In 2012, one of his stories (That Winter) received the Pushcart Prize.

Mazzini won the 2016 Kresnik Award for his novel Otroštvo (Childhood).

in 2019 he won best screenplay for the film Erased at FEST festival, Belgrade, Serbia, [3] and at the Raindance festival, London, UK. [4]

Reviews

"In ... Guarding Hanna, [Mazzini] has created a bestial protagonist ... a gargoyle of a man [who] struggles heroically with his own nature only to find that life has played him one horrific joke."

Village Voice

"[Hanna's] a wonderful creation: vulnerable, lonely, trying to keep her mood upbeat but not always succeeding. In fact, she’s just the thing to melt the Beast’s hostility—or drive him, with her chatter, to homicidal distraction....Throw in the narrator’s grim musings on his lot in life and his occasional urge to strangle Hanna, and you have a tonic mix of menace and comedy that keeps things hopping right up to the book’s twist ending."

Seattle Times

Commentary

In October 2019, Mazzini commented on the decision of the Swedish Academy to give the Nobel Prize for literature to Peter Handke by saying, "some artists sold their human souls for ideologies (Hamsun and Nazism), some for hate (Celine and his rabid antisemitism), some for money and power (Kusturica) but the one that offended me the most was Handke with his naivety for the Milošević regime (...) I found him cruel and totally self-absorbed in his naivety." [5]

Fiction books in English

E-books

Films

Multilingual web film project

A Very Simple Story is a script in multiple languages, read by actresses from different countries. Mazzini was the screenwriter and director of both the Slovenian (8:28) and Italian (9:57) films. The project was nominated for the Prix Europe award.

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<i>The Cartier Project</i>

The Cartier Project is a novel by Miha Mazzini. It was first published in Slovenia in 1987 under the title of Drobtinice ("Crumbs"). It sold 54000 copies and won "the best Slovenian novel of the year" award and "Zlata ptica" award for excellent artistic achievement by a young writer, 1988.

<i>King of the Rattling Spirits</i>

King of the Rattling Spirits is a novel by Miha Mazzini. It was first published in Slovenia in 2001, with a second edition in 2008 and third edition in 2011, under the title of 'Kralj ropotajočih duhov'. The author has explored other ways to tell the fictionalized autobiographic story before the novel. Those included short story published in 1995 as illustrated text in Ars Vivendi magazin, and years later a screenplay for his film Sweet Dreams that won several awards at different film festivals in 2001. The novel was selected as one of 100 books to read from Eastern Europe and Central Asia by Calvert Journal.

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<i>Erased</i> (2018 film) 2019 film

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References

  1. "A Literature of Independence: Miha Mazzini | Books Feature | the Skinny".
  2. "YuMex, Jugoslovanska Mehika". IMDb .
  3. "Filmovi "Divljina" i "Slučaj Makavejev ili proces u bioskopskoj sali" laureati 47. FEST-a - Vesti".
  4. "'The Planters' triumphs at Raindance Film Festival".
  5. Cain, Sian (10 October 2019). "'A troubling choice': authors criticise Peter Handke's controversial Nobel win". The Guardian. Retrieved 19 May 2020.