Before tonight’s award ceremony, there will also be a conversation with the nominees for the Cankar Award in the Alma Karlin Hall. Nina Dragičević, Anja Radaljac, Aljoša Harlamov, Tina Volarič and Ajda Bračič were shortlisted with their works. Photo: Bojan Velikonja
Looking forward to the best book of the year
Dreva will know who will receive the Cankar award for the best literary work of the previous year. Ajda Bračič, Nina Dragičević, Aljoša Harlamov, Anja Radaljac and Tina Volarič were nominated for it with their books.
In the Alma Karlin Hall in Cankarjev dom, today at 6 p.m., the final act of this year’s Cankarjev award, intended for the best original literary work that was published in book form in the Slovenian language, will begin today. The expert jury, consisting of Mateja Pezdirc Bartol (president), Igor Divjak, Lucija Mandić, Diana Pungeršič and Tomaž Toporišič, will announce at the award ceremony which of the five nominated works it has awarded this prestigious award to, and while they make their decisions, those present will be able to listen to a short cultural program supported musically by Petra Vidmar, the central part of which will be a conversation with this time’s nominees and nominees, who will be led by Tanja Tuma, president of the Slovenian Pen Center. The keynote speaker at the event will be the writer Sebastijan Pregelj, who was with the novel In Elvis’ room also the first recipient of the Cankar award.
The Cankar Prize can be awarded to a book from any of the literary genres in which Ivan Cankar also wrote, i.e. prose, lyrics, drama or essays, and the works shortlisted this year have been known for some time: they are novels Come on Bračič Firefliesa hybrid essay Impossible Nina Dragicevica novel Dohtar and Flood Man Aljoše Harlamovaa philosophical novel if you don’t come back Anje Radaljac and poetry collection There’s an ear somewhere inside Tina Volarič.
Transcending genre boundaries
A total of twelve publishing houses submitted their book editions from last year to the competition for the prize, and the expert jury then selected 35 works for the final evaluation. “The collection was dominated by novels, there were 22 of them, along with some collections of poetry and essays and two collections of short prose; but this time we noticed the absence of dramatic works, which can probably be attributed, at least to some extent, to the fact that relatively little original Slovenian drama is published in book form,” explained a member of the jury during the presentation of the nominees Diana Pungersič. “Due to the very nature of the prize, which is open to artfully diverse works, we also had to deal with a correspondingly diverse range of books, but we were quite united in the final choice.”
Nevertheless, it is possible to find some (general) common traits among the nominated authors and the author – they are mainly the pens of the (younger) middle generation, who are already more or less established in the Slovenian literary space, and their work is often characterized by a kind of interweaving of genres – this is how the jury for the novel debut of Ajda Bračič Fireflies noted, among other things, that it unfolds on several levels, and in it we find elements of a family saga, documentary content, fantasy and crime fiction, and ecological issues gradually come to the fore, while a hybrid essay Impossible Nina Dragičević reflects on the systematic erasure of Slovenian female composers from the collective memory through an unusual but convincing “author’s combination of essay, narrative, documentary material and poetic interventions”. Also a crime novel Dohtar and Flood Man Aljoše Harlamova offers an “exciting genre hybrid” that interweaves historical material, legalities of crime, literary insights and parody with humor and irony, while Anja Radaljac’s dystopian “philosophical novel with sci-fi elements” is similarly unusual.
The Cankar Award, which was established in 2019 by the Slovenian Pen Center, the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, ZRC SAZU and the University of Ljubljana, will be awarded tonight for the seventh time, and the winner will receive 7,000 euros, among other things.
