Books set in North Macedonia

About the literature of North Macedonia

Writing from North Macedonia reaches back to Ohrid, where disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius worked in the late ninth century. The standard Macedonian language was codified only in 1945, and Albanian-language writers are part of the country's literature too. Little has been translated into English, but what there is covers a century of the country's history.

Petre M. Andreevski's Pirej follows a village couple through the Balkan Wars and the First World War. Vera Bužarovska's The Last Summer in the Old Bazaar ends with the deportation of Bitola's Jews in 1943, and Živko Čingo's The Big Water is set in a harsh orphanage after the Second World War. Lidija Dimkovska's A Spare Life follows twin sisters in Skopje as Yugoslavia breaks apart. Rumena Bužarovska's My Husband gives voice to eleven women in present-day Macedonia, in sharp, darkly funny stories.