Aleksic Wins Nis Award for Best Children's Book

There is something almost indecently fitting in a poet who has spent years writing about genies, scarecrows and that elusive third thing winning, for that very book, a prize with a flower in its name. Maleni cvet, the City of Nis award for the best book for children and young people published in the previous year, this season went to Dejan Aleksic for his poetry collection Genies, Scarecrows and Something Else, published by Laguna. The jury reached its decision unanimously at a session held on June 16, a rare luxury of agreement in the world of literary prizes.

The three-member jury was made up of Professor Danijela Kostadinovic, Dr Milica Aleksic and the writer Violeta Jovic. The award is being given for the tenth time this year, with support from the City of Nis and the Ministry of Culture, which makes this year’s choice a small anniversary for a persistent, unflashy institution. At a time when children’s literature is still treated as a side track of serious writing, Maleni cvet is one of the few places where it is measured by its own demanding standards.

Why is poetry for children not lesser literature?

The question that shadows every award of this kind is whether writing for children is the easier discipline or the harder one. Aleksic’s body of work offers an uncomfortably clear answer. His poetics rest on wordplay, semantic reversals and what might be called metapoetic winking, devices that would pass for the avant-garde in the adult section but here work as a conversation with a reader who has not yet learned to fear a poem. The jury singled out precisely the collection’s genre and stylistic variety, its construction as a complex, layered whole.

This is the line Aleksic has worked along for decades. Born in Kraljevo in 1972, he has published twelve poetry collections and more than twenty books for children, and his verse has been translated into about ten European languages and entered the readers and required reading of primary schools. In other words, this is not a poet who occasionally drops into the nursery, but an author who has built his poetics at both ends at once, so that the border between so-called serious and so-called children’s poetry barely exists in his work.

What does the award say about what we read to children?

The value of a prize like this lies not in the plaque but in what it signals to the market and to parents. Laguna, a publisher with strong distribution, gets confirmation that investing in demanding rather than merely entertaining poetry for children also carries critical backing. Nis, for its part, builds a reputation as a place that thinks about literature for the youngest readers in a systematic way, through an award that has survived ten editions, long enough to create its own canon of laureates.

What remains, of course, is the thing no jury can decide, namely whether children will actually read these verses or whether the collection, crowned with its flower, will end up on the shelf among other award-winning but unopened books. Aleksic’s poetics, all play and reversal, has a good chance of surviving outside the ceremony hall. And you, when you choose a book for a child, do you look at whose name is on the cover or only at how colorful it is?