Academy Award winner Danis Tanovic is directing the movie 'Cirkus Columbia' with Đikić as a co-screenwriter
Ivica Đikić
Ivica Đikić was born in 1977 in Tomislavgrad, Bosnia and Herzegowina. Started writing for the newspapers at the age of sixteen. He was journalist for daily newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija (Split, Croatia), and since late 1996 writes continuously for politically satirical weekly magazine Feral Tribune, the newspaper that won several prestigious world journalistic awards. Since 2001 he is the magazine's co-editor.
For his novel Cirkus Columbia (Edition Feral Tribune, Split, 2003) he received book award 'Meša Selimović' for the best fiction book in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegowina and Montenegro. The book speaks about individual and social breakdowns of the recent war taking place in Bosnian province.
In 2004 Đikić publishes political biography of Croatian president Stipe Mesić 'Patriotic Turnover' ('Domovinski obrat', VBZ, Zagreb). The book analyses the political and personal life of former president of Yugoslavia, later first prime-minister of independent Republic of Croatia, to being elected as president of Croatia in 2000. In 2005 he won the second presidential mandate.
In 2007 Đikić publishes his second fiction book 'Ništa sljezove boje' (Edition Feral Tribune, Split) which consists of three separate stories ('Green Castle', 'Please, Try and Sleep', 'As Nothing Ever Happened'). The main subject of these stories is again war with its direct and indirect consequences and set-backs caused by it.
Ivica Đikić lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia.
BOOKS
'Circus Columbia' (2003)
translations// French, Italian
awards// 'Meša Selimović' for the best fiction book in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegowina and Montenegro
film// Academy Award winner Danis Tanovic is directing the movie 'Cirkus Columbia' with Đikić as a co-screenwriter; the film should be released in 2009
'Patriotic Turnover' (2004)
'Ništa sljezove boje' (2007)
About 'Circus Columbia'//
Đikić's first novel is a story of a small Bosnian town and its people during the war in the nineties and during the years following the war. The novel is explicitly describing horrible and timid atmosphere of the town where collective sorrow and grief reach almost a mataphysical level, while its inhabitants' lives seem to be an ongoing conglomerate of personal tragedies. Being victims of the world that 'doesn't belong to them' but which they are forced to live in, characters often try to flee in a kind of a better environment; then again, after long years of suffering abroad they come back drawn almost by a 'siren call', something of a pleading irrational impulse to ease one's pain.