Dubravka Ugrešić was the author of several novels and volumes of essays that have been translated into over 30 languages.
Ugrešić taught at a number of American and European universities, including Harvard, UCLA, Columbia and the Free University of Berlin.
She was the winner of several major literary prizes including the 1998 Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In 2012 she won the Jean Améry Essay Prize, awarded for her essayistic work as a whole, and her book Karaoke Culture was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 2011.
Ugresic, who was born in the former Yugoslavia and lived in Amsterdam, was shortlisted for her entire body of work for The Man Booker International Prize 2009.
Between 2005 - 2015, the Man Booker International Prize recognised one writer for their achievement in fiction.
Worth £60,000, the prize was awarded every two years to a living author who had published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language.
The winner was chosen solely at the discretion of the judging panel and there were no submissions from publishers.
The Man Booker International Prize was different from the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that it highlighted one writer’s overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. In focusing on overall literary excellence, the judges considered a writer’s body of work rather than a single novel.