Wanderlust Literary Agency
“The best way to know the soul of another country is to read its literature.”
Amos Oz
About Wanderlust Literary Agency
Wanderlust Literary Agency is based in Germany and has an international focus. After several years of working in partnership with publishers worldwide, but especially in Eastern Europe and Germany, the international book market is the focus of the agency. In accordance with the literary wandering motif of German Romanticism, to which the agency owes its name, the overriding goal is to let books “travel”, because the agency feels committed to the above-mentioned quotation, which understands literature as a mirror of human existence that contributes to mutual understanding, tolerance and acceptance. A growing network consisting of publishing houses, cultural institutions as well as literature and scouting agencies worldwide contribute to making the authors available to the widest possible variety of people in as many cultural circles as possible.
The agency’s primary aim is to provide support in the placement of titles that have already been published with publishers around the world. Debut authors are welcome to submit their titles, but work on the text will be possible in very few cases. The focus of the agency is broad and lies on sophisticated as well as light-entertaining fiction – especially crime novels – children’s and youth literature as well as occasional non-fiction.
News
Two titles are due to be published by Austrian Wieser Verlag this fall and in spring 2025:
- Alida Bremer’s first translation of the poetic Latin American travelogue Latino Americana (Fall 2024), by author Marko Pogačar, known in the German-speaking world for his poetry,
- Marko Gregur’s biographical-fictional novel, Vošicki (spring 2025), about the young, visionary publisher Vinko Vošicki, who was the first to have the courage to publish authors such as Miroslav Krleža, Karl May and August Cesarac. Translated into German by Blažena Radas.
At BuchWien, Robert Perišić will hold a reading and discussion of his short story collection “Horror und Hohe Unkosten”, recently published for the first time in German by Brot und Spiele Verlag.
Authors
Children’s and Youth Literature
Svjetlan Junaković (23 January 1961, Zagreb) received his BFA in sculpting from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan in 1985.
Since then, he has been continuously engaged in drawing, illustration and sculpture (the first 25 years as a freelance artist, and now as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb). He has authored numerous books for children that have been published in more than thirty countries and won dozens of international awards. He won the Bologna Ragazzi Award in Bologna for the book Gran libro de los retratos de animales (OQO editora, Spain) in 2008, as well as best book awards in Spain (2007) and Italy (2008).
As a Croatian representative, he has twice been nominated for the Hans Cristian Andersen Illustrator Award, the most significant award for the illustration of children’s books.
Rights: All but Asia
Fiction
Referring to Our Man in Iraq: “Robert Perišić is a light bright with intelligence and twinkling with irony flashing us the news that postwar Croatia not only endures but matters”.
Jonathan Franzen“No-Signal Area, is a profound, perceptive, virtually omniscient tour de force of genius and wisdom. I’m not kidding”.
Nell Zink“Perišić’s [A Cat the End of the World] takes on the shape of a philosophical fairy tale . . . this dreamlike novel tries to depict attachments that are freer than any proposed by the laws of civilization.”
Sam Sacks, Wall Street JournalConsidered one of the most influential voices in contemporary Croatia, Robert Perišić is the author of three novels and a short story collection. In his current novel, A Cat at the End of the World (2022), Perišić embarks on a journey back in time to antiquity. This book, which resembles a fable and focuses on the escape of a slave boy across the Adriatic Sea to the present-day island of Vis in Croatia, the relationship between animals and humans, and the development of the history of the world as seen through the eyes of a south wind, is wrapped by Perišić in an unprecedented literary form.
A Cat at the End of the World: Previously published: USA, Sandorf Passage (2022), Croatia, Sandorf (2022).
No Signal Area: France (Gaia-Actes Sud), USA and Great Britain (Seven
Stories Press), Serbia (Lom Books), Macedonia (Goths), Slovenia (Beletrina), and Italy (Bottega Errante).Our Man in Iraq: Great Britain (Istros Books), USA (Black Balloon Publishing), France (Gaia-Actes Sud), Italy (Zandonai), Sweden (Gavrilo förlag), Serbia (Profil Belgrade), Bulgaria (Damyan Yakov), Macedonia (Makedonska reč), Slovenia (Beletrina), Austria (Leykam Buchverlag), Czech Republic (Art Libri), Turkey (Final), Egypt (Ibn Roshd), Ethiopia (Hohe) and Russia (Rudomino).
Rights: World
Josip Nowakovich is a multi-award-winning Croatian-Canadian author and university lecturer, Man-Booker Prize finalist, and author of two novels, six volumes of short stories, a novella, a variety of essays, and three textbooks on language and creative writing. In his latest political-satirical novel, Rubble of Rubles (2022), the and the reader:into modern Russia is brought to life in comic-tragic exaggeration. In the early 2000s, David, an investment banker with Eastern European roots, is bankrupted by the Enron fiasco and moves to Russia to find himself. In the shadow of the Khazan Cathedral, he is arrested for the alleged murder of two Georgian wine importers. David is imprisoned in Kresty, confused and alone. One day Putin himself comes to visit and makes David a modest proposal: he should travel to Georgia and mix plutonium into the president’s wine. This is the price of freedom: an assassination attempt on a president.
Previously published: USA, DZANC Books (2022).
Rights: World
Tatjana Gromača is particularly known in Croatia for her poetry. In her novel “Divine Child” she describes the disintegration of a mother from the perspective of her daughter. A book that describes in a personal and autofictional way the effects of the Yugoslavian war and the ethnic conflicts in the former multi-ethnic state.
Previously published: Croatia, Fraktura (2012), USA, Sandorf Passage (2021), Germany, Stroux Edition (2022)
Rights: World
Neon South is a Latin American travel narrative off the beaten path that unfolds like a novel, following locals who are all too aware of how outside influences, from colonialism to globalism, have changed their lives. From the drug cartel-controlled squares of Mexico to the Venezuelan jungle where the outside world threatens traditions, Marko Pogačar takes in everything he encounters with the eyes and words of a poet, finding humor in the absurd and intimacy in despair. Unexpected commonalities emerge in the compilation of these tropical experiences, which merge with Pogačar’s memories of life during the breakup of Yugoslavia: “Are our customs, our kingdoms, our churches and wars, our arsons and human sacrifices, then, one iota different from those of the Aztecs?”
Rights: World
Already published: USA, Sandorf Passage (2022), Croatia, Sandorf (2022)
Forthcoming: Austria, Wieser Verlag (2024)
Set in World War II Yugoslavia, Radio Siga transmits the story of Kalman Gubica, a hard-drinking, but well-meaning, layabout who is forever changed after being struck by lightning. Haunted by the voice of his long-dead father, Kalman struggles to find meaning in his life. Drinking more doesn’t help quiet the maddening messages in his head and neither does settling down with a Russian female soldier, nor joining the resistance trying to keep at bay the Hungarian fascists and German Nazis who have occupied Yugoslavia. Darkly funny and touching, Radio Siga reveals a facet of World War II not often encountered by English-language readers.
Rights: World
Previously published: USA, Sandorf Passage (2022), Croatia, Sandorf (2022)
Ever Obi’s novels are simultaneously touching and brutal. While Men Don’t Die (2019) addresses issues of love, friendship and happiness and the role money and status plays in the pursuit of the same Some Angels Don’t See God (2021) touches upon the taboo topic of incest, shame and a past that has never been worked through and catches up with you eventually. Obi’s writing is sensitive, his characters are profoundly human and even though the regional Nigerian issues are always present, the themes of his books are universally relevant.
Previously published in: UK, Abibiman Publishing
Crime Fiction
With The Lake Tadej Golob wrote a crime novel changing the boundaries of popular fiction writing within the Slovene literary scene. The book has received much praise by literary critics in the country, due to its carefully arranged characters and well thought out and extremely skillfully written story. Further proof of this are the three reprints of the book within a short time after it was first published in November 2016.
On New Year’s Eve, Taras Birsa, senior crime investigator at the Ljubljana Police Directorate, is on his way home from a skiing trip on Mount Vogel above Lake Bohinj. In the midst of a snowstorm, he comes across a girl who has discovered the corpse of a woman in the river, missing its head. A tour de force arises around the questions: Who is the victim? Who is the murderer? Was the perpetrator some madman or was the unknown woman killed as part of a larger crime?
The novel is set in recognizable Slovenian surroundings, the tourist area of Lake Bohinj and the daily routine of the capital, Ljubljana. The protagonist is a model family man and detective with quite a reputation in his field. He is also a former mountaineer, a sworn recreational sportsman who is sometimes secretive, sometimes impulsive, but always thoughtful and amusing.
Previously published in: Slovenia, Goga Publishing (2016), UK, Dixi Books (2022), Italy, Croatia, Ukraine,Macedonia
Rights: World
Ikenna Okeh comes from Nigeria and now lives in Antalya and London. As the author of the crime novel Rouges of the East and the novel Deportee, the story of a Nigerian deported from Cyprus to Nigeria, Ikenna Okeh succeeds in portraying the reality of Nigeria in a realistic way, especially for Western readers.
Previously published: UK, Abibiman Publishing, France, Mera Editions (2024)
Rights: World
Biographical Fiction
When Miroslav Krleža traveled through Russia for six months between the end of 1924 and the beginning of 1925, the celebrated Croatian writer was there to figure out what it all meant. The sprawling country was still coming to terms with the events of the 1917 revolution and reeling from Lenin’s death in January 1924. During this period of profound political and social transition, Krleža opened his senses to train stations, cities, and villages and collected wildly different Russian perspectives on their collective moment in history. Krleža’s impressionistic reportage of mass demonstrations and jubilant Orthodox Easter celebrations is informed by his preoccupation with the political, social, and psychological complexities of his environment. The result is a masterfully crafted modernist travelogue that resonates today as much as it did when first published in 1926.
Rights: World
Already published: USA, Sandorf Passage
Forthcoming: Austria, Wieser Verlag (2024)
Marko Gregur was awarded the prestigious Fric and Vladimir Nazor prizes for Vošicki. Extensive yet concise as it describes the experiences and traces of many lives, the novel follows the life of Czech immigrant Vinko Vošicki, from his arrival in Koprivnica, Croatia, in 1909 to his death in a basement without electricity or water, in 1957. Vošicki was a publishing idealist and convinced of the power of books and literature. He is known today for being the first publisher to have published Karl May, August Cesarac and Miroslav Krleža at a time when no one else dared to publish them.
Rights: World
Already published: Croatia, Hena Com (2020)
Forthcoming: Austria, Wieser Verlag (2024)
In this book, Jasminka Domaš impressively sketches the life story of Edith Stein (1891-1942), who was born as the youngest daughter into a very conservative Jewish Orthodox family. A proven expert on Jewish culture and history, Domaš recounts Edith Stein’s early doubts about the existence of God. An angelic apparition, however, brings her back to the path of faith, though not the Jewish faith, but the Christian faith. She decides to join the Carmelite nuns and is baptized a Catholic as Teresia Benedicta of the Cross. The inevitable confrontation between Edith and her strictly Jewish mother represents a preliminary climax of the book and is in the tradition of the Platonic dialogue. In the end, however, life in the convent cannot protect Edith Stein from the mass deportations of the Nazis. She and her sister Rosa were deported from the Netherlands to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942 and murdered there. The deportation described in turn raises philosophical-existential questions that – even in light of the unimaginable inhumanities of the death camp – ultimately cannot be answered.
Rights: World
Already published: Germany, Anthea Verlag (2022), Croatia, Litteris (2017)