David Albahari (b. 1949) is a Serbian writer who has lived more than 10 years in exile in Canada. He went into exile because the former Yugoslavia was torn apart by ethnic war. Albahari left the country in 1994, at the peak of the conflict, and from 1995 to 1997, he wrote three books which are known as his Circle novels: Snow Man, 1995; Bait, 1996; Darkness, 1997. Displaced and far away from his country, Albahari examined in his new novels how place and history impacted personal identity. Moreover, he argued against the negative-though prevalent-discourse about the Balkans, seeing instead in his war-torn homeland a universal historical and cultural conflict.Albahari's books, prior to his exile, were almost exclusively concerned with the inability to communicate in a postmodern society. His early prose style was experimental and anti-realistic, fragmented and often autopoetical-closer to that of the lyric than to that of the epic narrative. Influenced by the social changes and ethnic clashes in the former Yugoslavia, he transformed his prose, recapitulating reality within the epic form. Metafiction, dominant in his earlier works, gave way to postmodern realism. Albahari, too, transformed his own identity as an author, abandoning the indeterminate subject position common in experimental fiction and embracing a self that is grounded firmly in a historical moment, however incoherent and violent it may be.Although he spends most of the time in Canada, Albahari is still regarded in his homeland as one of the most accomplished and beloved contemporary writers. In October 2006, he was elected to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the most eminent institution in the country. And though at this point Albahari is introduced as a Canadian author, he remains in many ways undeniably Serbian in his sensibility. To date, he has published ten novels, ten collections of stories, and two books of essays. In Serbia and the former Yugoslavia, he is a critically acclaimed bestselling author. His prose is translated into 14 languages, among which are English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.This interview was conducted in 2005 and 2006, while Albahari was in Belgrade and Calgary-his two homes.Q: You have been living in Canada for more than a decade. The protagonists in all of your books written in Canada are very uncomfortable in the environment to which they immigrated. How do you feel after more than a decade?A: I feel entirely differently from my protagonists. On the one hand, North American culture had been very familiar to me even before coming to Canada, which means that I didn't experience any cultural shock. My protagonists are mostly going through different phases of cultural shock when they find themselves on this continent, and to a great degree they aren't on me, but on my view of that experience among other people. On the other hand, coming to Canada made my dream of dedicating all of my free time only to writing, translating and other writing activities come true. (For fulfillment of that dream I'm also thankful to my wife who has a steady job and who's willing to put up with a husband who doesn't work at anything but writes.) In other words, I feel very good in my new environment, and after ten years in a country of immigrants such as Canada-and spent in the same place!-y ou start feeling like an experienced native.Q: Almost all of your novels are written in the first person, and those from the 1990s are focused on exile and the war in the former Yugoslavia. However, only Bait, the novel about the narrator's mother and turbulent history of the former Yugoslavia, was recognized as a novel truly on an autobiographical experience, even though you claimed that you had never had the recording tapes mentioned in the book and that the mother in the book is just based upon your mother. How do you explain that?A: Not only the books I wrote after my arrival to Canada but also a great part of other things that I've written are on my experience. …