Biography

Miha Mazzini (born 3 June 1961 in Jesenice, Yugoslavia) is a Slovenian writer, screenwriter and film director with thirty published books, translated in ten languages. He has a PhD in anthropology from the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis and has MA in Creative Writing for Film and Television at the University of Sheffield. He is a voting member of the European Film Academy. His childhood took place in a unique atmosphere, with a grandmother who was seeing ghosts and souls, angels and the devil, and a mother who admired communist dictators and ruled cruelly over her only subject, her son. He described his childhood in Titoist Yugoslavia, in three novels. The protagonist of the 2002 novel King of the Rattling Spirits (based on his 2001 Sweet Dreams film script) is 12 years old and in the 2015 novel Childhood the protagonist is five. In the third novel "It's Personal" (2022) the protagonist sums up his childhood and the consequences it left him with.

His first novel Crumbs (American title The Cartier Project) was set in his hometown of Jesenice and published in 1989 and sold 54,000 copies. It won the government award for the best novel of the year and Mazzini won the award for excellent artistic achievement by a young writer, given by the opposition. That was highly unusual for the times when Yugoslavia started slowly breaking apart.

He was the first Slovenian writer to write a novel about the erased, people who lost all of their rights and legal status after the declaration of the country's independence in 1991. Later he adapted the novel for the feature film Erased.

His historical novel Paloma Negra deals with Yu-Mex music in the 1950s, when Yugoslav singers started mimicking the songs and music they've seen in Mexican films. During the research for the novel, Mazzini recorded the stories told by protagonists and made a documentary called Yugoslav Mexico (YuMex). The novel German Lottery is set in the same era but deals with swindlers, illusions and unreliable protagonists.