Dubravka Ugresic's works have been translated into many languages. She has been compared favourably with writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Milan Kundera and Virginia Woolf, and was recently awarded Italy's prestigious Premio Letterario prize for best foreign author. She entered self-imposed exile when Croatia's late president, Franko Tudjman, proclaimed Croatia to be 'paradise on earth' in the early 1990s.