A double historic victory for this fantasy novel! The book’s success in France is absolutely explosive at the moment.
The novel “Mladenka kostonoga” (La Sorcière à la jambe d’os / The Bony-Legged Bride) has just achieved extraordinary international recognition in France.
At the end of May 2026, it was awarded the prestigious 2026 Prix Imaginales for Best Foreign Novel in Translation, the most important French prize devoted exclusively to fantasy literature.
In France, the book appeared under the title “La Sorcière à la jambe d’os”, published by Le Sonneur Publisher, and its remarkable success owes much to the exceptional translation by Chloé Billon, who managed to carry into French the novel’s complex, archaic, and stylistically playful voice.
Winning the Prix Imaginales places the Croatian writer Želimir Periš among a select group of major international fantasy authors who have received this honour in previous years, including writers such as Mariana Enríquez and Robert Jackson Bennett. The award confirms the universal power of Gila’s story and propels contemporary Croatian literature into the forefront of European fantasy.
Translator Chloé Billon has won the very first edition of the 2026 Prix Intergalactiques de la Traduction SFFF.
This new distinction is organized as part of the Les Intergalactiques Science Fiction and Fantasy Festival in Lyon, in partnership with Lyon 3 University.
A historic first ! Chloé Billon is the inaugural laureate in the history of this award, created specifically to honour translators who manage to bring into French complex works of the imagination (SF, fantasy, the fantastic literature) from lesser‑translated languages, thereby valuing linguistic diversity.
The difficulty of the translation: The jury emphasized that Želimir Periš’s postmodern style—blending oral poetry, historical jargon, inquisitorial records, and even kitchen recipes—required translation work of exceptional difficulty.
A golden week: In just a few days, the French edition “La Sorcière à la jambe d’os” captured both the Prix Imaginales for the author and the Prix Intergalactiques for the translator.
This recognition confirms that translation from Slavic languages (such as Croatian) is essential for enriching European literature with fresh perspectives and unique mythologies.
Želimir Periš’s „Mladenka kostonoga”, 2020 (La Sorcière à la jambe d’os / The Bony-Legged Bride) doesn’t simply enter the fantasy canon—it kicks the door off its hinges, storms inside dripping Balkan mud and imperial blood, and demands to be heard.
This is not a novel you read.
This is a novel that hunts you, hexes you, and drags you across the 19th century by the collar until you taste the iron in its history.
And now it has the crown to prove it: winner of the 2026 Prix Imaginales for Best Foreign Fantasy Novel, a triumph that detonated across the French literary scene like a spell gone delightfully wrong.
As if that weren’t enough, its translator, Chloé Billon, seized the first-ever Prix Intergalactiques de la Traduction SFFF, turning this book’s French debut into a double-barreled cultural earthquake.
A week of pure, incandescent glory.
But the real force of nature here is Gila.
Gila, the witch with the bone‑leg. Gila, the healer, the fugitive, the mother, the myth. Gila, who becomes the accidental midwife of dynasties and the sworn enemy of empires.
When the Austro‑Hungarian archduke decides to force an abortion upon the fragile, terrified empress, he summons Gila—unaware that she herself is secretly pregnant.
What follows is a jailbreak of bodies and destinies: Gila flees with the empress, tries to save the unborn heir, fails, and then gives birth alone in the wilderness.
No witnesses. No proof.
And so the world assumes her child is the imperial child.
A witch births a Habsburg. History shudders.
From there, the novel becomes a long, breathless chase across forests, mountains, borders, and centuries of superstition. Imperial guards hunt her.
Priests interrogate her. Villagers whisper her name like a curse.
And when they finally catch her—when the machinery of empire grinds her down—she slips through its gears, reemerging years later in Vienna as Alica, a spirit‑medium dazzling the bourgeoisie with séances that feel a little too real.
Želimir Periš builds this saga like a mosaic shattered and reassembled by a trickster god.
Each chapter arrives in a different shape: an inquisitorial transcript, a police report, a pastoral interlude, a recipe, a piece of theatre, a music review, a choose‑your‑own‑adventure fragment. The novel is a kaleidoscope, a labyrinth, a literary séance where the dead, the living, and the imagined all speak at once.
And beneath the stylistic fireworks lies a raw, beating heart:
a meditation on womanhood, power, survival, and the brutal absurdity of empire.
This is a Croatia on the cusp of rationalism, where folklore and rebellion simmer under the surface, where national identities are being forged in the furnace of oppression.
Gila becomes the axis around which these tensions spin—a woman too powerful to be erased, too inconvenient to be allowed, too alive to be forgotten.
Želimir Periš, the Zadar-born polymath—writer, poet, computer scientist, festival organizer—has spent years weaving feminist, queer, and postmodern threads through his work.
But “Mladenka kostonoga” (2020), the original Croatian novel, is his masterpiece: winner of the T‑portal Award for Best Croatian Novel, winner of the Kočićevo pero, and now a European fantasy phenomenon.
And Chloé Billon’s French translation?
A miracle of linguistic necromancy.
She resurrects archaic dialects, oral poetry, bureaucratic jargon, and witch‑lore with a precision that borders on sorcery.
No wonder she became the first laureate of the Intergalactiques Translation Prize—this book is a translator’s Everest, and she planted her flag at the summit.
“La Sorcière à la jambe d’os” (Mladenka kostonoga / The Bony-Legged Bride) is more than a novel.
It is a rebellion disguised as folklore.
A feminist epic disguised as a picaresque.
A Balkan howl echoing through the marble corridors of empire.
And now, with its French triumph, it stands as proof that the most powerful stories are the ones that refuse to stay buried.
Gila walks.
And the world follows.
* The novel “Mladenka kostonoga” has not yet been translated in full into English, and no complete edition is currently available on the Anglo‑American market.
For English‑language readers, the text exists only in the form of translated excerpts and selected passages.
The English titles that circulate today come from specific channels of cultural promotion rather than from any published edition.
Although no American or British publisher has released the book, two official sources have generated the English working titles now in use.
Croatian cultural export catalogues, including those produced by the Ministry of Culture and the government‑run Croatian Literature platform, present the novel internationally under the name “The Bony‑Legged Bride” when pitching translation rights at major book fairs such as Frankfurt and London:
Academic and literary journals have also contributed to this provisional English presence.
A substantial chapter, translated by Marina Veverec and published in SIC Journal (A Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, Zadar University, Croatia), appeared under the slightly adapted title “Boney‑legged Bride“, offering English‑speaking scholars a first glimpse of Periš’s world:
The meaning of the original title is deeply rooted in Slavic folklore.
“Mladenka kostonoga” echoes the traditional epithet of Baba Yaga, the legendary witch known as “the bone‑legged one” in many South Slavic tales.
While the French edition chose to foreground the witch figure directly with “La Sorcière à la jambe d’os“, the English working versions preserve the literal sense of the Croatian title, where “mladenka” evokes the archaic figure of the bride or maiden, and “kostonoga” marks her as the one with the bone‑leg—a mythic, uncanny presence drawn straight from the old stories.
