After a long and difficult illness, the writer and journalist whose sharp texts cut through Croatian reality for decades has died at the age of 77, prompting colleagues and academics to reflect on their own courage.
Writer and journalist Vedrana Rudan has died at the age of 77 after a long and difficult illness. Her texts critically carved into Croatia's tense reality, and what she dared to underline with her pen, few had the courage to say publicly.
Born in Opatija on October 29, 1949, Rudan grew up in Mošćenička Draga in an extremely poor family, with a father who was a fisherman and gardener and a mother who was a homemaker. She started earning money at the age of twelve, and throughout her life she held a variety of jobs, from selling newspapers and ice cream, tour guiding and translating, to working in education, radio, and journalism.
She graduated in Croatian language and literature and German language and literature, and due to her unconventional views, she was fired several times during her career. In the Rijeka area, she remained recognizable as the editor of the cult Radio Rijeka show "Primorska poneštrica."
She appeared in literature only in 2002 with her debut novel "Ear, Throat, Knife." In the character of Tonka Babić, she poured, as critics wrote, "an enormous amount of vitriol, raw energy, and uproarious humor." With this novel, she tried to dispel the trauma of war.
Her second novel, "Love at Last Sight" (2003), brought the experience of an abused woman. "I felt the need to shed that burden, and just as 'Ear, Throat, Knife' helped me shed the trauma of war, with this one I wanted to shed the trauma of beating a woman, and I succeeded, so now let someone else tremble while reading it," Rudan said.
She published more than sixteen books translated into numerous languages, including the novels "Blacks in Florence" (2006), "A Man in the Throat" (2016), "Life Sentence" (2022), the autobiography "Dance Around the Sun" (2019), and the column collections "I, the Unbeliever" (2004), "Fear of Knitting" (2009), "In the Land of Blood and Idiots" (2013), "Why I Swear" (2015), and "Life Without Ticks" (2018).
Critic Slobodan Prosperov Novak wrote that Rudan "shows that violence, revenge, and hatred, even when expressed with a meager lexical and poor syntactic repertoire, can find a path to an urban audience." According to him, "curses and verbal crudeness, brutality, and inevitable insults are the basic ingredients of all of Vedrana Rudan's manuscripts."
In the scholarly paper "Positioning the Female Subject in Contemporary Croatian (Pseudo)Autobiographical Discourse," Ivan Bujan emphasizes that "this is a female subject who has found a path from being an object of knowledge to a knowing subject." Nensi Bagarić, in her master's thesis, notes that Rudan's texts, "with their particularly provocative language that abandons given frameworks, are attributed to women's writing as a textual act of resistance and the revelation of the importance of women."
Writer Ivana Šojat described her as "brave, admirably brave in a world that declaratively adores truth but actually abhors it." "She spoke and wrote the truth that some muttered under their breath, others pretended not to see, and still others fled from as if from a terrible revelation," Šojat said.
Prof. Miranda Levanat-Peričić, PhD, from the Department of Croatian Studies at the University of Zadar, said that "Vedrana Rudan was a pure manifestation of Said's outsider, a position necessary for an intellectual to responsibly question authority and advocate for marginalized groups." She also reminded of a key event: "Let us remember that in 2009, Vedrana Rudan was fired from Nova TV because she read the names and surnames of killed Palestinian children from Gaza live on air."
Levanat-Peričić emphasizes that Rudan "will be remembered above all for her consistency, incorruptibility, and iconoclastic approach to the West, especially toward American and Israeli politics." Her departure, as she put it, "is an opportunity to look in the mirror and ask ourselves what the very purpose of intellectual speaking, reading, and writing is."
