Awards

• Winner of English PEN Award 2021

Overview

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with liquid gold, to highlight and celebrate an object's past. In this powerful and personal novella, Senka Maric uses the concept of kintsugi to interrogate ideas of illness, survival and recovery. Two months after her husband packs his bags and leaves the family home, the narrator finds a lump in her armpit. It's a discovery she's been dreading ever since her mother's breast cancer diagnosis sixteen years earlier, and one that will change her body forever. Through diagnosis, chemotherapy, and surgery, the narrator returns to those moments of her girlhood when she learnt to be ashamed of her sexuality and estranged from her body - the same body that now threatens to fall apart during her illness. Laced with a drive for life, sensuality and pleasure, Body Kintsugi is an intimate and optimistic book about a woman's relationship with her body as it breaks and is put back together.

Full Product Details

9781908670731

Table of Contents

Reviews

'A brave book written from personal experience that offers us much-needed hope in the victory of life over death' Faruk Sehic, author of Under Pressure and Quiet Flows the Una; 'The writing is intimate - patient, sensory, murky - a portrait of consciousness under duress.' Stacy Mattingly, Literary Hub; 'Nobody has written about the female body in our language like Senka Maric.' Sasa Dragojlo, Noizz; 'Gentle and combative, sad but not at all pathetic, it is an unusually strong narrative about weakness.' Vladislava Gordic Petkovic, Bosnian scholar

Author Information

Senka Maric was born in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1972. She is a writer and editor and is the author of three poetry collections and two novels. She is also the editor-in-chief of the online literary magazine Strane. Her works have been translated into Spanish, Russian, German, Hungarian and Slovenian. Body Kintsugi, which won the prestigious Mesa Selimovic Prize, is her first book to be translated into English.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available