Depicting the atrocities of the 20th century, she won international acclaim for writing that was ‘often brutal, but at the same time beautiful’

Acclaimed Croatian novelist and playwright Daša Drndić, who confronted the atrocities of the 20th century in her writing, has died aged 71, her UK publisher has said.

Drndić had been living with cancer for almost two years, and died on Tuesday night in Rijeka, her publisher MacLehose Press confirmed. Associate publisher Katharina Bielenberg called Drndić’s writing “viscerally angry and often brutal, but at the same time beautiful and entirely human”.

“She herself was a tremendously warm person who embraced life and new friendships, and enjoyed them to the full,” said Bielenberg.

In Drndić’s 2007 novel Sonnenschien, which was published in English under the name Trieste and shortlisted for the Independent foreign fiction prize, an old woman waits to be reunited with her son, 62 years after he was taken from her by Nazi authorities. Using everything from trial transcripts to photographs in her fiction to pin down the horrors of the Holocaust, Drndić also lists the names of some 9,000 Jews who were deported by Italy or killed by Italy during the war.

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In Belladonna, picked by the Guardian last month as one of the best new European novels being translated into English, Drndić writes of an elderly man’s battle with cancer. Her publisher at Croatian press Fraktura, Even Seid Serdarević, told the Guardian then that reading her books was like “being emotionally punched in the stomach all the time”.

“Unflinching and uncompromising, Drndić’s writing never allowed its readers to turn away from truths, from the facts of some of the 20th century’s worst, and yet rarely spoken of, atrocities. ‘Every name carries a story’ is a refrain that runs through her books, which contain lists, tables, photographs, family trees,” said Bielenberg.

In her last novel EEG, to be published in November, Drndić writes: “History remembers the names of criminals, while the names of victims are forgotten.”

Bielenberg said that Drndić was a major writer in Croatia and the former Yugoslavian countries, although she was often highly critical of her country’s – and others’ - politics. In an interview with the Paris Review in 2017, she spoke of “how history is repeating itself, how its monstrous face is surfacing”.

“Recently in Charlottesville, but throughout Europe and beyond, the extreme right is approaching, fortunately still on tiptoe and in les petits pas, which of course does not make it less dangerous. There are no small fascisms, there are no small, benign Nazisms,” she said. “That is what I try to talk about in my books, the importance of remembering. In this age of aggressive revisionism – which tends to brainwash our already damaged, deformed minds – without memory, we are easy prey to manipulation, we lose identity.”