Miha Mazzini

Miha Mazzini got his official start as a writer with the publication of his first novel, The Cartier Project, in 1987. Word of the book spread throughout Yugoslavia, and by year’s end the book had not only sold the amazing number of 54,000 copies (a typical Slovenian novel has a print run of a thousand or less, and a bestseller sells a couple thousand copies at the most), but was also awarded the Best Novel of the Year by both the state and opposition presses at the time.

Mazzini went on to write several more novels, in addition to the computer publications he became as equally well-known for, and also added film to his resume. His script for The Cartier Project helped the film win the Best Film of the Year in 1992, and his semi-autobiographical script for “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This” won several award at film festivals throughout Europe.

With Guarding Hanna, Mazzini’s first U.S. publication, he wanted to explore the possibilities of love, or lack thereof, in the framework of a twisted Beauty and the Beast. “I wanted to do a story that’s extreme, maybe even offensive to a lot of readers,” Mazzini says, “but true to the state of mind of a man with a specific childhood and with a specific state of maturity.”

While The Village Voice credits the high amounts of rainfall in Mazzini’s native land for Guarding Hanna’s dark vision, and The Seattle Times calls the book “a superb introduction to a vital new voice in Eastern European literature,” Mazzini is decidedly un-Slovenian or Eastern European in his worldview. Mazzini’s early introduction to Hollywood B-Movies as a child, especially horror flicks, has given him his uniquely grotesque and absurd, and, at times, comfortingly sentimental vision that resonates in both Hanna and her beast of a bodyguard in Guarding Hanna.