"I used the definition of Southeastern Europe as: Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Moldova, and Slovenia. I tried to make sure that each country was represented in the list below.
Many of these countries have been through turmoil in the past century. After Yugoslavia broke up in 1991, new borders were drawn and secessions, violence, and new political regimes criss-crossed the region. The shift into nation-building, into questions of language and memory, into trying to make sense of violence and politics, sparked a new push in national literature, a resurgence that led to new novels in Croatian, Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and more.
These countries (of about 12.5 million people) are connected by region, but they're made up of a huge mosaic of cultures, ethnicities, languages, and, of course, literatures."
