Ana Marija Grbić

- Serbia -

Ana Marija Grbić (born in Belgrade in 1987) is a Serbian poet, creative writing mentor, editor, and illustrator of poetic comics, as well as her own and other authors’ poems.

 

She studied at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade at the Department of Serbian Language and Literature with World Literature, received her Master’s Degree from the Department of Serbian Literature, and she is currently in the final year of her PhD studies at the same faculty. She is the founder and coordinator of the ARGH poetry group and a creative writing mentor.

 

Her poems have been translated into Polish, English, Macedonian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian. She is a member of the Serbian Literary Society and the Serbian PEN Center. She published three collections of poetry: Yes, but Don’t Be Afraid (Da, ali nemoj se plašiti, 2012), Mons Veneris and Others Mountains (Venerini i ostali bregovi, 2014), and Earth 2.0 (Zemlja 2.0, 2017).

 

She also published prose books: Idols and the Last Days (Idoli i poslednji dani, 2018) and Roe Deer Back (Srneća leđa, 2021).


“In my opinion, Mons Veneris and Others Mountains (Venerini i ostali bregovi) is a step forward in comparison with the author's first book. The unusual and bold approach she chose made the sensibility from Yes, but Don't Be Afraid (Da, ali nemoj se plašiti) sound stronger, more complex, and mature. Regarding this book, it would be interesting to talk about the unity and diversity within the framework of one's poetic expression, but also about the issue of female writing. (...) Why does it appear to me that it is a constructed world – that stands somewhere between the Mediterranean and Central Europe, in which I often recognize the Art Nouveau décor from the beginning of the twentieth century – and a lyrical hero – whose character I imagine sometimes looking like Kafka and sometimes like Srečko Kosovel – that speak of our time and place, of the phantasmatic aura of our reality, far more directly than a series of veristic poems? The successful combination of immediacy and construction, their inseparability and mutual conditioning, seems to be the basis of the strength of the author's expression.”

- Bojan Vasić

 

Earth 2.0 (Zemlja 2.0) in addition to its undeniable literary and artistic qualities, is also important because it concerns us. It concerns us, Generation Y, which suffers from a fatal defocus due to historical guilds that are, to a non-negligible extent, recognizable when seem from a distance of history textbooks of dubious credibility, let alone that it created those guilds itself. This is a generation that, unlike the “lost generation”, the “baby boomers” and Generation X, has not been left with any ideological stronghold, no matter how susceptible to derisive deconstruction it may be, using it as a sort of a focal point, even if it refutes that ideology. That generation was led to a flash-like post-ideology where it stumbles, trying to decipher the relapses of the old world, and find itself the most valid position. Those looking for the aforementioned focus in this book will certainly not go astray.