For the last six years, playwright and novelist Borivoj Radakovic has invited leading writers from the UK to Croatia, and more recently to Serbia, to perform to huge festival audiences alongside the very best authors from the countries that make up the former Yugoslavia. The Festival of Alternative Culture, FAK, is legendary in Croatia and Croatian Nights celebrates the networks it has created. Containing 18 new short stories set in Croatia, this anthology, published by Serpent's Tail, features nine UK authors and nine writers from the former Yugoslavia, most of whom appear in English translation for the first time.

Borivoj Radakovic
Borivoj was born in 1951 in Serbia and currently works as a full-time writer in Zagreb. Often thematcially and stylistically provacative, his work includes prose and plays, essays and critical writing. His novel Sjaj epohe (The Brilliance of the Epoch), 1990, gained cult status, whilst his 1996 play, Dobro dosli u plavi pakao (Welcome to the Blue Hell), was banned by Croatian authorities. Radakovic founded the now legendary FAK (Festival of Alternative Culture) a festival and network of new writers and publishers and, through his translations, has introduced new British and American writers, such as Niall Griffiths, Hanif Kureishi and Alex Garland, to Croatian readers.

Niall Griffiths
Niall was born in 1966 in Liverpool, a city with historical associations with north Wales. After studying English at Cambridge, and periods in several cities across Britain, he moved to Aberystwyth in west Wales where he now lives. He burst on to the literary scene in 2000 with Grits (Jonathan Cape), a ferocious novel narrated through a revolving series of vernacular voices. Sheepshagger (Jonathan Cape) followed in 2001. His third novel, Kelly and Victor (Jonathan Cape) appeared in 2002 and is now being filmed, with his fourth novel, Stump (Jonathan Cape) published in 2003 and his latest novel, Wreckage (Jonathan Cape) published in March 2005.

Salena Godden
Salena is a London based poet, broadcaster and performer, and the lead singer and lyricist for underground ska-punk-break-beatcha-wife duo SaltPeter with Peter Coyte. Although still very much featured and published in small presses and underground magazines, Godden was most recently published in Penguin's IC3 and Serpents Tail's Oral and the Tell Tales short stories anthologies.

Tony White
Tony's most recent novel is the critically acclaimed Foxy-T (Faber). He is literary editor of The Idler and also edited the Britpulp! anthology. Tony speaks and studies Serbian and Croatian and has been involved in cultural networks in the former Yugoslavia since the early 90s.

Tickets: £3 (£2 concessions)

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