My Name is Damjan

My Name is Damjan
Slovenija
Suzana-Tratnik-fotoNadaZgank-150x150.jpg.pagespeed.ce.j9vFTROzVV
Suzana Tratnik
Why did you do this, why didn’t you do that, why, why, why? Sometimes I used to fantasize about having a book written about me, but not in the way these guys here are doing it, making me feel like I’m being questioned by coppers.

Damian sits in the self-help group of troubled teenage boys and girls and finally tells them and us the story of his bitter-sweet life. His path of searching for his true self and love begins with the change of his name and continues through conflicts within the family and therapy sessions with his psychologist. Actually he has already messed up big time some time ago when he dropped out of school and lost his job, thus ruining his chances for a a better life he is still dreaming about. Damjan falls in love with Nela, a lesbian activist and a hairdresser becoming a social worker, and together they join the gay and lesbian scene. Nela means hope for Damjan. She is the one whom Damjan tells all about himself – and not the psychologists. But he is losing Nela, almost entirely by his fault. Looking at his life and the choices he’s made Damjan himself calls it »the Damjan’s path« on which his one year younger friend Roki seems to be the only person whom he can lean on.

Suzana Tratnik was born in 1963 in Murska Sobota, in Slovenia. She obtained her BA in sociology from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana, and her MA in gender anthropology from the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis in Ljubljana. She published six collections of short stories: Pod ničlo (Bellow Zero, 1997), Na svojem dvorišču (In One’s Own Backyard, 2003), Vzporednice (Parallels, 2005), Česa nisem nikoli razumela na vlaku (Things I’ve Never Understood on the Train, 2008), Dva svetova (Two Worlds, 2010), and Rezervat (Reservation, 2012), two novels: Ime mi je Damjan (My Name is Damjan, 2001) and Tretji svet (Third World, 2007), the children’s picture book, a monodrama Ime mi je Damjan (My Name is Damjan, 2002), a radio play, two expertises on lesbian movement and literature, memoirs on activism and a collection of socio-political essays. She received the national “Prešeren Fund Award” for Literature in 2007. Her books and short stories have been translated in more than twenty languages, while she herself has translated several books of British and American fiction, non-fiction, and plays.