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‘without memory, the present becomes sick, mutilated, a torso with amputated organs’ — EEG by Daša Drndić, translated by Celia Hawkesworth   Those who knew Daša Drndić loved her for her relentless pursuit of the truth, her rage against injustice, and her passion for writing about difficult subjects, in particular the complicity of the fascists in her native Croatia during the Holocaust and the ethnically-driven conflicts of the 1990s Her novels are about the necessity of bearing witness, of refusing to forget, and their contemporary resonances are obvious: her books offer salutary warnings against allowing radical nationalism and ethnic hatred to raise their ugly heads in Europe once again Drndić, who died of lung cancer on 5 June 2018, aged 71, leaves behind an extraordinary array of work, with five of her thirteen novels translated into English All expose the collusion of those who have either remained silent or attempted to deny past horrors and war crimes   Drndić was born in Zagreb in 1946, when Croatia was part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, into a middle-class family of intellectuals Her psychiatrist mother, Timea, died of cancer aged just 50; her beloved father Ljubo, a journalist and wartime partisan, served as ambassador to Sweden and Sudan, and lived to 93 Drndić was raised in both Serbia and Croatia, studying philology at the University of Belgrade, before winning a Fulbright scholarship to the US Later she travelled, and worked as a journalist and translator, a professor of English, an editor, playwright and producer for Radio Belgrade’s drama department She was forced to leave Belgrade in the early 1990s because of growing nationalism – she was dismissed negatively as a ‘Croat’ In 1995 she moved to Canada with her daughter, where they remained as refugees until 1997 Later, she studied for a PhD at the University of Rijeka, where she lived for the rest of her life   Drndić’s work had been published in Hungarian, Macedonian, Slovenian, Serbian and Dutch before MacLehose Press became the first to translate and publish her books in English, with her 2007 novel Trieste,