Last month, I was invited to be a Guest of Honor (along with Anne McCaffrey and Stephen Baxter) at EuroCon 2007 in Copenhagen. I had a lovely time, especially visiting Denmark in the autumnal season.
Pictured above, from left to right: fellow GoH Ann McCaffrey, her assistant Carol, my humble self, my wife Mia, and Ruth and David Hardy. We are enjoying lunch together at a Copenhagen eatery.
And here I am, taking a well-deserved break on the Copenhagen waterfront.
Here I am, flanked by two actresses performing a multimedia piece based on my book Amarcord, at art gallery Ozone in downtown Belgrade.
Last night, I was honored with 2007 Stefan Mitrov Ljubisa Award for lifetime achievement in literature. The award, named after one of the greatest Montenegrin writers of the 19th century, is a major mainstream literary prize that also includes €1,000 (US$1,300).
Here are eight exclusive photos from the award presentation ceremony, held in a ninth century church (the oldest in this part of the world) in the Montenegrin Adriatic city of Budva.
1. Screening of a film based on one of my stories.
Downtown Belgrade, 2:00 PM, June 20th, 2007…
The temperature reading is 52.3 Celsius, or 126.14 Fahrenheit.
Last night, I was honored with the 2006 Isidora Sekulic Award for my mosaic novel The Bridge. The award, named after one of the greatest Serbian female writers and essayists of the 20th century, is a major mainstream literary prize chosen by a majority vote of jury members. It comes with €2,500, or about US$3,300.
A brief speech by Prof. Slobodan Grubacic, president of the award jury, announcing the award at a ceremony at Belgrade City Hall:
The Isidora Sekulic Award for 2006 has been presented to Zoran Zivkovic for his novel The Bridge. The decision was made by majority vote of jury members.
It is not easy to interpret the work of an author who knows so much about life that he could write an encyclopedia of the living and the dead, and who knows absolutely everything about art – so much that he could easily devote his books to the supra-conceptual reconciliation of conscious and unconscious states. Nevertheless, although Zivkovic follows the principles of storytelling honed from his previous books, here the prose he offers is not full of introspection and deep internal enlightenment. He does not place his stories in astral regions, in places of an inaccessible metaphysical reality. On the contrary, he finds the fantastic of everyday events to be a highly powerful tool with which to produce unusual literary work. Furthermore, at a time in which the anecdote is easily transformed into a cosmic event, and a cosmic event into an anecdote, the fantastic has proven to be an element that successfully transports the everyday prose of events into the poetry of literature.
This principle is not forsaken in the awarded The Bridge, either. Themes of doubles, raincoats, meeting on a bridge – with us from Hoffman to Gogol and from Hofmanstal to Kafka – eloquently indicate Zivkovic’s dexterity at playing with familiar and less known themes in world literature, of which the most powerful is anagnoresis, the ancient motif of recognition. A master of brevity, the author of The Bridge uses it almost according to Aristotle: the symbols, the memories, the conclusions that are made, whether accurate or not. Illusory simplicity conceals the clusters of a perfect composition in which characters constantly examine their human essence, living their losses as their sole, inalienable possession.
Every culture wants to have a writer like Zoran Zivkovic.
Last weekend, I participated in the Thessaloniki Book Fair, and had the opportunity to meet in person with Kedros, my Greek publisher. Here I am posing for photographs at my publisher’s stand.
And about to be interviewed . . .
I know my English-reading audience won’t be able to understand a word, not even to read a Cyrillic word, but I still thought you might wish to see it: my interview in the leading Serbian daily newspaper Politika, published today.
A unique image, as seen in a weekly Serbian magazine: two Zoran Zivkovics. (The one to the left is the prime minister of Serbia, of the same name.) The photo was taken at the Amarcord premiere.
Yesterday evening, the publication of my mosaic novel Amarcord was launched at the Film Archive Theater in Belgrade.
First, a short film, “The Confessional” (15 minutes), based on my story from Impossible Encounters, was screened. Then, Alexander Yerkov, a professor of contemporary Serbian literature, talked about Amarcord. After that, I read a story from the book (“Dead Souls”). Finally, another short film was screened, based on the ninth Amarcord story, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.”
Last night was the opening of the movie Two, based on my stories “The Train” (which was broadcast as a reading by BBC Radio 4 in 2005) and “The Hotel Room” (both from Impossible Encounters) at the Belgrade International Film Festival FEST. It was glamorous as expected, with my humble self presented to the audience as well.
Two was very well received by the premiere audience and received massive applause at the end. I understand it is already invited to a number of European film festivals.
Here is an exclusive photo from the ceremony: the leading actors Ana Sofrenovic and Predrag Ejdus, director Purisa Djordjevic, and the general manager of FEST.
And a still from the film:
