Writing to survive

摘要

In late 1991 Aleksandar Hemon was at his family's mountain cabin above Sarajevo, immersed in literature, when the Bosnian Serb nationalist and eventual war criminal Radovan Karadzic appeared on television. When Mr Karadzic prophesied the "annihilation" of Bosnia's Muslims, Mr Hemon writes in a new book of essays, it surpassed anything his then 27-year-old "humanist imagination" could conceive.