BIO

Sanita Fejzić is a novelist, playwright, poet, and essayist.

Her debut novella, Psychomachia, was shortlisted for the 2016 Ken Klonsky Novella Contest and the 2017 Canada ReLit Awards. Her children’s story, (M)other, was translated into French by Sylvie Nicolas as Mère(s) et monde. It first appeared as a poem that was shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize.

Her first full length play, Blissful State of Surrender, premiered at the Great Canadian Theatre Company on February 22, 2022. It was nominated for five Rideau Awards, winning the Best Actress category. In 2023, Sanita produced Why Worry About Their Futures at the undercurrents festival, a tryptic of three short plays about the social and climate crisis: the world premiere of “The Sky It Falls” by Keith Barker, “The Auden Test” by Lawrence Aronovitch, and the world premiere of her short play, “Expecting.”

Sanita holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University for which she articulated an artistic and political movement she calls ‘Peasant Futurisms.’ Peasant Futurisms expresses peasant perspectives of the future, past, and present by grounding peasant ways of knowing, relating, and being in the world. Specifically, in Sanita’s body of work, Peasant Futurisms poses a challenge to capitalist cities made for cars by imagining edible and wilder eco-cities surrounded by peasant food belts within radically local and cyclical economies of care and mutual aid. Her forthcoming radio play, produced by the National Arts Centre as part of its Irresistible Neighbourhoods project, is part of the peasant futurist movement.

Her essay about ecological responsibility, titled “Entangled Bodies in a Stubbornly Material-Textual World,” was published in the feminist magazine, Canthius. She also co-edited two critical anthologies of essays, prose, poetry and art, including Refuge(e) and Dis(s)ent, both launched at the International Writers Festival in Ottawa.

Sanita lives with her wife and two children on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people in Ottawa, Canada. She is originally from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She fled the Siege of Sarajevo and genocide at the age of seven, and lived as a refugee, illegal immigrant, and “temporary guest” across three countries before seeking permanent refuge in Canada. 

Fejzić is pronounced fey-zitch: /fɛj – zɪtʃ /. If you can say Nietzsche, you can say Fejzić.