Not least due to the great success of Didier Eribon’s autobiographical writing Return to Reims, the personal essay is celebrating a comeback: perhaps because it can also be described as a „crisis genre“, it fits so well our crisis-ridden days. In analogy to Eribon’s title, our project could be imagined as a „Return to Bosnia“. Such a return, given above mentioned, historical reasons, will also often include a crisis.
The personal essay, which captures this personal reflection, allows a great deal of creative freedom: the narrative thread of the essay can start from a very specific scene from the past. It can be based on an object, a smell, a photograph, a habit of a known person, a characteristic, a landscape, and much more.
However, this project is also open to experiments with literary or artistic alienation: Some material may want to be trimmed first to allow itself to be told.
[Cover picture: Emina Haye, 2022.]
