Underground Barbie

As it is often said in fairy tales and historical analyses, Maša's childhood years were a time when empires were falling—the time of the war in Croatia, 1991. Underground Barbie is set in that era, but also in the sounds of her childhood, the music, and the atmosphere that accompanied Barbie's move from plastic, yet safe, dollhouses to air-raid shelters. Her Barbie was interpreted and narrated by a famous Croatian singer Tatiana Tajči Cameron, known to the Croatian public primarily for her wildly successful music career that burst out while representing Yugoslavia during the Eurosong competition. This is a story about the Barbie generation, which still remembers Yugoslavia and socialism but truly grew up and formed its views and interests in the 1990s. It is also the last generation that seriously played with dolls. Later, electric toys prevailed, the family as the fundamental unit of society and children’s play disintegrated, and dolls became as unconvincing as fairy tales had a few decades earlier. 

Maša Kolanović published several scholarly works and literary works: the poetry collection Leeches for the Lonely (2001), the novel Sloboština Barbie (2008), the prose poem Jamerika Trip (2013), and the short story collection Dear Insects and Other Creepy Stories (2019) for which she received the Vladimir Nazor Award, the European Union Prize for Literature, and the Libar za vajk Award, and was a finalist for the Fric Award. She is an associate professor in the Department of Croatian Studies at the University of Zagreb.

The publication of Underground Barbie audiobook is co-funded by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia.

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