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Poet

Sanjin Sorel

Sanjin Sorel

Sanjin Sorel

(Croatia, 1970)
Biography
The writer, critic and essayist Sanjin Sorel (1970) was born in Rijeka, where he attended secondary school and studied at the Faculty of Philosophy. He earned his doctorate, on the poetry of the contemporary Croatian poet Tonči Petrasov Marović (1934-1991), at this faculty in 2003. He currently lectures there and holds the Chair in Croatian Literature.
Sorel is undoubtedly one of the leading Croatian poets of the younger generation which came of age and received recognition in the second half of the 1990s. As a poet, he seems to be irresistibly drawn to what could be described as “verbal magma”, as though the very heaping-up of words was sufficient reason to defy the established rules of a text. The text\'s specific verbal formulation then sets up the expectation of a different type of experience. On the other hand, Sorel is capable of condensing his poetic expression into a few lines, and hence his shorter poems possess an energy that lends his longer poems a verbal élan rarely met with in contemporary Croatian poetry. 

Sorel also incorporates the theoretical hypotheses and insights of translated and widely-recognised critics into his poetry almost unmediated, so that his extended personal poetics press at the very boundaries of lyrical expression. In this respect, his grasp of modern Croatian avant-garde poetics is obvious. Sorel is a poet who is able to perceive a kind of demonic confusion even in video games — and that confusion turns out to be a poetic confusion, naturally.

His new collection of prose poems, quite without precedent in Croatian poetry, was written as a fragmentary biography of the social philosopher and anarchist theorist Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (1814-1876), and it is entitled simply Bakunin (2006).
© Miloš Đurđević (Translated by Kim Burton)
Bibliography
Poetry

Palimpsest, Rival, Rijeka, 1997
Sonetaria, Ceres, Zagreb, 2001
Hologrami, žudnje, strojevi zavođenja, MH, Sisak, 2001
Apokalipse, Naklada MD, Zagreb 2002
Flumen Viti, ICR, Rijeka, 2003
Ljubavi, DHK, Zagreb, 2004
Bakunjin, HDP-Durieux, Zagreb 2006 

Isto i različito, antologija i studija hrvatskog pjesničkog naraštaja devedesetih, (An anthology and study of Croatian poetry from the 1990s), VBZ, Zagreb, 2006

Non fiction

Riječka književna avangarda, (critical studies), ICR, Rijeka, 2002
Mediteranizam tijela, (critical inquiry into the poetry of Tonči Petrasov Marović), Altagama, Zagreb, 2003
Sponsors
Gemeente Rotterdam
Nederlands Letterenfonds
Stichting Van Beuningen Peterich-fonds
Ludo Pieters Gastschrijver Fonds
Lira fonds
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère