Golden String after fifty-seven years: the question the competition does not ask
The Smederevo Poetry Autumn competition for the Golden String prize closes on 15 May, with the right of entry reserved for authors writing in Serbian, continuing an old practice that deserves fresh consideration.
At the Smederevo city library, where the jury of the international festival Smederevo Poetry Autumn gathers each year after Vidovdan, the wall carries the list of winners of the Golden String prize from 1968 to today, a total of fifty-eight poets, including names that in contemporary Serbian poetry mark canonical positions, from Milan Komnenic to Dragana Mladenovic. The competition for the fifty-seventh edition of the festival, held this autumn from 15 to 17 October, is open until 15 May, with the right of entry reserved for authors writing exclusively in Serbian, a formulation that in 2026 deserves more careful reading than is typically given to such institutional rules.
The Smederevo Poetry Autumn is an international festival, meaning that in its programme it gathers poets from on average twenty countries per edition, but in its main prize category it does not allow translations or authors working in other languages. The competition rules, published by the organisers in mid-April, ask entrants to submit thirty to fifty unpublished poems in Serbian in manuscript, prepared in a Word document in Cyrillic, with a separate document revealing the cipher under which the author enters. The winner receives a cash prize of five hundred thousand dinars and a published manuscript in the bilingual Golden String edition.
The bilingual nature of the edition, with the Serbian original and an English translation, is an element that is not stated as a formal condition in the competition but in practice means the winning manuscript can, in its international phase, reach audiences beyond the Serbian-speaking area. On the other hand, entry to the competition is closed, and that is a restriction the organisers have historically justified by the wish that the prize remain a “prize for Serbian poetry” and not for poetry in general, a position that can be argued both critically and in defence.
What this restriction means in the contemporary context
The question the Golden String competition does not ask, though it stands behind it, is what exactly “writing in Serbian” means in 2026. Does it mean being born in the Serbian-language area, a definition that would include authors from Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro and Kosovo but would leave outside, somewhere in Vienna, authors who come from second- and third-generation Serbian diaspora communities and use Serbian as their household language but not the language of their primary work. Does it mean working in Cyrillic, an additional filter the competition introduces that excludes parts of contemporary Serbian poetry which, for distribution reasons above all, have chosen the Latin script. Or does it mean working in literary standard, an institutionally more restrictive definition that would raise the question of what to do with poets who experiment with the vernacular, with slang, or with hybrid forms that incorporate other languages.
All these distinctions are not merely academic but affect the make-up of the generations of poets who have become visible in the Serbian literary field over the past fifteen years. Marija Dragnic and Vanja Pegan, among the most interesting voices of the younger generation, in their newer collections experiment with combinations of Serbian and English, which under the current rules of the Golden String competition places them in a zone of uncertain status, where the jury could disqualify their manuscripts before they reach the first round of reading.
The Golden String institution also has its contextual value, because in the Serbian poetry-prize sphere, where NIN gives its annual novel prize and the Vital prize honours a poetry collection, the Golden String is one of the few competitions open to unpublished manuscripts by young and middle-aged authors. That is its institutional function, often overlooked in the public reception of the festival. Festival director Sladjana Ivanovic, in a statement to the Smederevo portal Podunavlje, said one hundred and sixty-three manuscripts arrived last year, twenty-seven more than in 2024, suggesting interest in the prize is gradually returning after the decline recorded during the pandemic years.
As for the coming days, while the competition closes on 15 May, the festival’s October programme this year will bring guest poets from Hungary, North Macedonia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic, as well as a panel discussion on the theme “Small Languages and International Poetry”. The panel date, according to the preliminary festival announcement, is 16 October, which overlaps with the central award ceremony.
