Mirta Maslać
Mirta Maslać was born in Zagreb in 1993, where she finished elementary school and graduated high school. She graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb with a Croatian Studies and Comparative Literature degree in 2020. College education developed her interest in writing and literary theory, particularly in feminism, queer theory, psychoanalysis and left-wing thought. Her scientific works are based on linguistic analysis: in 2018, she published an article on the portal Stilistika.org about the change in the relationship of Croatian dictionaries to ideologues from socialism to the transition period, and her interdisciplinary graduate thesis on the speech of drag queens was published in the journal of the Center for Women's Studies Treća ( No. 22, 2020).
Her first novel, "Junak ili čudovište" [A Hero or a Monster], was published in 2018 in Zagreb by Durieux, with generally positive reviews. The novel deals with the mental illness of an adolescent girl in a psychiatric hospital through the prism of popular culture and humour, under which despair breaks through. During the creative break, she focused on finishing her studies. After that, she switched to writing in shorter form and won fourth place in the contest for the short story "Nastavi priču" [Continue the Story] (2021) and third place in the competition of the Festival of European Short Stories (2022).