Ms. Ugresic’s 2020 essay collection, “The Age of Skin,” looked at the erosion of cultural memory in recent decades.
For at least a decade, Ms. Ugresic’s name often came up when critics and industry watchers indulged in their annual speculation about who might win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She never did garner that award, but in 2009 she was on the short list for the Man Booker International Prize (which was won by Alice Munro), and in 2016 she won the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Ms. Ugresic was born on March 27, 1949, in Kutina, in what is now central Croatia. She earned her degrees at the University of Zagreb and published her first book at 22. A series of short, poetical stories, it was not intended for a young audience, but it was critically acclaimed as a new form of children’s literature.
In her 1978 novella “A Love Story,” she conjured a narrator who tries to impress a love interest by writing to him in different styles; Ms. Ugresic was beginning to experiment with ways to incorporate her literary expertise into her fiction. Three years later she wrote another novella, “Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life,” that was made into a 1984 movie, for which she wrote the screenplay.
Although some of Ms. Ugresic’s writing focused on dislocation and exile, she also turned a critical eye on the United States in “Have a Nice Day” (1995), a collection of essays drawn from her early-1990s stay at Wesleyan that Paul Goldberg, reviewing in The Times, did not find amusing or insightful.
“Judging by this book,” he wrote, “Ms. Ugresic saw little of the United States, made few friendships of any depth and watched television a lot.”
Ms. Ugresic’s survivors include a brother, Sinisa.
In a 2002 interview with Bomb magazine, Ms. Ugresic talked about her decision to abandon Croatia.
