Dragan Velikić, This Year’s Vilenica Prize Winner
This year’s Vilenica Prize winner is Serbian writer Dragan Velikić, author of The Russian Window, a novel that was translated into Slovene and Macedonian as part of the 100 Slavic Novels collection.
The jury of this distinguished Central-European literary award wrote that “bitterly humorous, Velikić’s literary works mirror the family’s moments of crisis, expose inhuman narrow-mindedness, provide confrontation with the real world in an individual’s situation, and hint at the collective/individual nature of psychological experience, the differentiation between the cognitive subject and the reality of the outside world.” At the award ceremony in Vilenica Cave the author stressed that a book is the most important place where one can meet with other cultures, “with everything that once was and with everything that may be, anytime and anyplace.”
Dragan Velikić