Alexander Boldizar

Alexander Boldizar (born in Czechoslovakia, now Slovak Republic, 1971) is a writer, lawyer and art critic. He was the first post-independence Slovak citizen to graduate with a "Juris Doctor" degree from Harvard Law School. [1] [2] His writing has won a PEN prize (PEN/Nob Hill) [3] , represented Bread Loaf Writer's Conference as a nominee for the Best New American Voices anthology [4] , and received various other awards.

Life

Born in Košice, Czechoslovakia, in 1971, Boldizar's family escaped to Austria via Yugoslavia in 1979. After six months in an Austrian refugee camp, Canada granted the family asylum. Boldizar became a Canadian citizen in 1983. He attended Merivale High School in Ottawa, where he was captain of the rugby team, followed by McGill University, from which he graduated in 1994 with the Brian Coughlan prize for earning the highest GPA in the economics department [5] . He also won the 1993 McGill Open Beer Mile championship. [6]

Boldizar went on to study law at Harvard Law School, starting in the class of 1998 but finishing in the class of 1999 due to a year of absence during which he went to the Sahara (Niger, Africa) with a paleontological expedition for the Discovery Channel/National Geographic.

Although Boldizar had renounced his Czechoslovak citizenship in 1989 so that he could attend the anticommunist demonstrations as a noncitizen (during which he was almost arrested anyway), President Rudolf Schuster of Slovakia revived Boldizar's citizenship by special presidential order in 1999, making him the first Slovak citizen to graduate with a "JD" from Harvard. Boldizar's grandfather, Vojtech Zahorsky, was recently awarded the Kosice Prize (i.e., "keys to the city") for his contributions as a partisan during WWII and his service as the head of the Slovak Veteran's Association. [7]

Career

Boldizar worked briefly as an attorney at the San Francisco office of Baker & McKenzie, before leaving law in order to write. He has published over sixty articles in fiction venues like Transition Magazine, Fiction International, Chicago Quarterly Review, Literary Imagination, and Phantasmagoria, nonfiction venues like Harper's Bazaar, The Globe and Mail, Shambhala Sun, Liberty Magazine, C-Arts Magazine, and Harvard Law Record, and legal venues like the European Journal of International Law and Golden Gate Law Review. He is now an editor of C-Arts Magazine, a contemporary art magazine published out of Singapore.

He has one novel, titled The Ugly, about Muzhduk the Ugli the Fourth, a member of a lost tribe of boulder-throwing Slovaks living in the mountains of Siberia whose land is stolen by American lawyers. He is sent on a quest to Harvard Law School to learn how to defeat the lawyers.

Style

Although his writing style is clean, almost minimalist, Boldizar tends towards "idea fiction" in the heritage of Kafka, Musil, Hrabal, Borges, Laurence Sterne, and some of Calvino, eschewing the psychologism and domestic realism of most contemporary American fiction. He writes in English, but with traditionally East European traces of absurdism and surrealism, though he balances these with an "airport novel" style of complex plot-driven narrative.

Select Bibliography

Fiction

# The Ugly -- Prologue (BNAV nominee), in Transition Magazine, December 2006, issue 96
# Metropolitan Avenue, in Chicago Quarterly Review, Spring 2008.
# Before the Law: a Rebuttal, in Chicago Quarterly Review, Fall/Winter 2007.
# Bureaucracy, in Literary Imagination: Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, November 2005
# Rain, in Phantasmagoria, February 2006
# Pulling Shadows (winner of PEN/Nob Hill prize), in Fiction International, November 2005

Non-Fiction

# The Case Against Voting, in Liberty Magazine, forthcoming September 2008.
# Handbags of the Apocalypse, in C-Arts Magazine, forthcoming September 2008.
# Hers, in C-Arts Magazine, forthcoming September 2008.
# Reading Objects, in Gaya Art News, July 2008.
# Living Sculptures: The Myth of the Eternal Golf Course, in C-Arts Magazine, July 2008.
# Synthetic Times: Media Art Now, in C-Arts Magazine, July 2008.
# The Other Shoe, in C-Arts Magazine, May 2008.
# Asia Contemporary Art Week, in C-Arts Magazine, May 2008.
# Art and Automobile: BMW's Art Cars, in C-Arts Magazine, March 2008.
# Michelle Swayne: Magnet Bali, in Harper's Bazaar, December 2007, pp. 186-190.
# Made Wianta: Sharp, in Gaya Art News, December 2007.
# Michelle Swayne: Yellow, But Not The Sun in C-Arts Magazine, November 2007, page 136.
# Indonesian Art and the Primordial Androgyne, in C-Arts Magazine, November 2007, pp. 115-118.
# Michelle Swayne: From Tennessee to Indonesia in The Tennessee Tribune, October 2007, pp. 8-10.
# Sisi Puitik Pada Seni Rupa Michelle Swayne in Suardi Magazine, October 2007, pp. 25-27 (pseudonymous).
# Michelle Swayne: Yellow But Not The Sun, in Gaya Art News, October 2007.
# Nino Mustica: 11 Totems, in Gaya Art News, August 2007.
# Anti-Aging: 15 Cemeti Artists, in Gaya Art News, June 2007.
# Art Review: Filippo Sciascia, in Harper's Bazaar, March 2007.
# Dinosaurs on the Roof, in The Globe and Mail, September 2003.
# Earthquake in the Himalayas, in Shambhala Sun, March 2002.
# Bali: Paradise Lost, in The Globe and Mail, October 2002.
# Paradise, in Liberty Magazine, January 2002.
# Nepal Porters, in The Globe and Mail, June 2001

Legal

# Ethics, Morals and International Law, in The European Journal of International Law (Spring 1999, p.1-37; Oxford)
# The Development of Legal Culture in the Czech Republic, in The Golden Gate Law Review (Spring 1999, pp.163-204)

References

1. ^ http://haa.harvard.edu 2. ^ http://transitionmagazine.com/articles/lena.htm 3. ^ http://soulmakingcontest.us/page7.html 4. ^ http://middlebury.edu/academics/blwc 5. ^ http://www.mcgill.ca/economics/contact 6. ^ http://www.beermile.com 7. ^ http://cassovia.sk/newsread.php?newsid=512

External links

* http://boldizar.com
* http://c-artsmag.com