UQP acquires debut poetry collection from Dženana Vucic.

UQP is delighted to announce that we’ve acquired the debut poetry collection from Dženana Vucic. After War is a memoiristic poetry collection which unfurls from the dislocating trauma of the Bosnian war into the present day. It is an exploration of trauma and its aftermath: the trauma of war and familial abuse, as well as trauma inflicted through language and through silence. An unreservedly political project, the collection highlights the resonances between historical violences and those being committed in the present day. Although dealing with heavy subject matter, the collection mobilises humour and linguistic play and often lingers in moments of levity and warmth. In this, it refuses to be flattened to a trauma plot. It is a collection of survival, witness and resistance.

Dženana Vucic says:

After War is a collection of poems unfurling from the violence of the Bosnian war into the violences of now. Multilingual and formally varied, the collection explores trauma and its consequences, language and its limits, witnessing and what it means to witness. These are autobiographical poems but ones that I hope speak wider and deeper than their moment. I am beyond proud that the collection has found a home with UQP.

Publisher Aviva Tuffield says

I have long hoped to publish a book by Dženana Vucic, having been a fan of her impressive, rigorous essays and poetry for many years. Moreover, the list of fellowships she has received to date is a testament to her extensive talents and potential. Her first poetry collection is a standout: multilingual, lyrical, experimental and wide-ranging; reflecting on familial violence and separation, migration, refugee experiences and Islamophobia, among other things. Across the collection readers are variously located as “outsiders” to certain historical moments and, at others, situated as “insiders” and implicated in the silences and structures that enable acts of violence, whether on families, communities or the environment. This is a searing debut whose power lies in its strength clarity of vision.

About Dzenana Vucic

Dženana Vucic (she/they) is a Bosnian-Australian poet, essayist, critic and editor. Her poems have been shortlisted for the 2023 Judith Wright Poetry Prize, the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Prize and the 2024 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Her essays, reviews and poetry have been published in Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Crikey, Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin, Overland, Sydney Review of Books and others.

Dženana has been awarded a 2023 Kill Your Darlings New Critic Award and has been shortlisted for the 2020 Woollahra Digital Literary Award, the 2020 Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Writing and a 2019 Deakin Non-Fiction Prize. In 2021 she received the Kat Muscat Fellowship and in 2020 was a recipient of the Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowships. She has also been awarded a 2022 Marten Bequest and the 2022 Peter Blazey Fellowship to work on an autotheoretical novel about the identity, un/belonging, and myths of selfhood explored through her experiences of the Bosnian war, coming to Australia as a refugee and her return to Bosnia. Dženana holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow and is a fiction editor at SAND Journal. She lives in Berlin where she works as a freelance editor, copyeditor and proofreader, and teaches writing workshops.

UQP has acquired world rights and will publish in May 2026.

For more information, contact Jean Smith on jean.smith@uqp.com.au