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So Long, Friend: Remembering Jonathan Bousfield

Sadly, our long-time collaborator and friend, Jonathan Bousfield, passed away this April, leaving behind an enormous hole in the local cultural scene.

Over the years we have liberally linked to various articles from Jon’s excellent blog, Stray Satellite, here on Critical Mass because quite simply there was nothing else like it. Stray Satellite is an impressive kaleidoscope of various topics mainly focused on Croatia and the greater Eastern Europe region, ranging from alternative and pop culture to music, history, travel, literary and film reviews, social movements, and more.

 Jon was British, he was born and raised in Leeds, but he had been living in Croatia for the last 20 years. Starting with family camping trips to Yugoslavia in the 1970s, he was drawn to this region and eventually settled in Zagreb. He had a family here and completely integrated into the culture, achieving enough fluency in Croatian to translate fiction. He also surrounded himself with local intellectuals, writers, artists and musicians to such a degree that he firmly had his finger on the pulse of the undercurrent of alternative culture in this region from the 1980s onwards.

Jon was foremost a historian but also a kind of scholar of all trades. He made his name as a travel writer, writing the Rough Guide book for Croatia and co-writing many other Rough Guide books, but he also did stints as a rock journalist, and published many articles as a freelance journalist in local and international publications including Jutarnji List, Globus, Svijet kulture, Time Out Croatia, Calvert Journal, and New Eastern Europe among others. His articles and essays display a sophisticated, scholarly command of many topics from history to alternative and pop culture to music, literature, architecture, art and design to name a few. Jon also published a graphic novel, Crimson Quays (Grimizna Laguna in Croatian), in collaboration with local legendary comic strip illustrator Igor Hofbauer. It can be described as a subversive look at the dystopian underbelly of man’s wanderlust search for escape in the form of the vacation and travel industry and is also a darkly satirical take on what humans are searching for when they pine for escape.

There was no one quite like Jon. He was a brilliant but modest thinker and writer who straddled two cultures, exploring the lesser known parts of a foreign culture from a unique perspective. Jon expertly translated cultural, historical and social nuances of this region not only to foreigners but also to locals. His perspective was impressively informed and honed over years of learning about, observing, and immersing himself in the local cultural scene. Some of Jon’s most recent articles which appear on his website, Stray Satellite, include: a personal reflection on colonialism, specifically describing his grandfather’s attendance of a famous football match, the first to be played at the newly built Wembley Stadium, which then segues into his grandfather’s service in colonial wars abroad and how the mementos from these far away places affected Jon as a child, a review of new weird Croatian fiction, an article on how Jugoton was a cultural and artistic force for Zagreb during the time of Yugoslavia, an overview of the Singing Revolution of the Baltic States in the 1980s, a historical look at Kupari, the early 20th century Czech paradise on the Adriatic, and a meditation on Kundera and how to define the cultural space of Central Europe, among others.

With his impressive output and inimitable grasp of various cultural topics in this region, Jon was truly one of a kind and will be greatly missed. He leaves behind a wife and two young sons in Zagreb. 

You can read many of his articles on his blog, Stray Satellite, here

You can find his graphic novel, Grimizna Laguna, in Croatian here

And in English, (Crimson Quays), here