Drainac Poetry Prize Cuts 49 Books Down to 11
A jury in Prokuplje has picked 11 poetry collections from the 49 entered for Serbia's Drainac Prize. The winner is announced in late August.
Last year the Drainac statuette was collected in Prokuplje by a man who had not written the winning book. The poet Tomislav Marinkovic died before the ceremony on August 25, so the award for his collection “What the Angels Think of Us”, published by Arhipelag, was accepted on the family’s behalf by the critic Petar Arbutina. The new season of the Drainac Poetry Prize begins from that, and with a slightly bigger number than last time.
The Rade Drainac National Library in Prokuplje says 49 poetry collections published during 2025 across the Serbian-speaking region were entered, and that at its first sitting the jury reduced them to a shortlist of 11 titles. A year earlier there were 47 entries, from poets in Serbia, Republika Srpska and Montenegro. The rise is small, but it runs against the direction usually assumed for poetry publishing here.
The library runs the competition itself, and the prize is a statuette of Rade Drainac. It is not handed out in Belgrade but in the Toplica district, where the poet came from, and it is one of the few literary fixtures in Serbia that has stayed put for decades.
Which 11 books are still in?
The shortlist shares neither a generation nor a poetics:
- “Taman posla” by Dragan Markovic
- “Evo, andjela” by Selimir Radulovic
- “Suldigum, Lili Marlen” by Dejan Matic
- “Ne (o)guglati” by Dusan Mijalovic Adski
- “Jednom” by Olivera Nedeljkovic
- “Super 8 mm” by Zorica Bajin Djukanovic
- “Pokopani rt” by Dejan Ilic
- “Meta” by Marija Knezevic
- “Tajne pesme za Keti” by Zoran Ciric
- “Omorina nad kaldrmom” by Bora Kapetanovic
- “Blizanac vremena” by Nenad Saponja
No single school runs through it. Books written in a classical lyric register sit beside “Ne (o)guglati”, whose title drags the search engine into the vocabulary of poetry, and “Super 8 mm”, which takes film stock as a measure of memory. On the evidence of the list, the jury refused to pick a single taste.
The shortlist is also the only moment when a poetry prize can be discussed as a field rather than as one name. Once the laureate is announced, the other ten titles drop out of the news within a day, even though those 11 books are a sharper cross-section of last year’s output than any single award.
A jury without last year’s winner
The jury has three members. Goran Maksimovic chairs it, alongside Mirjana Bojanic Cirkovic and Dragan Ognjanovic. Maksimovic and Ognjanovic sat on the same panel last year, when the third seat went to the poet Dejan Aleksic, who had won the round before.
That arrangement could not be repeated this year, because last year’s laureate did not live to receive the prize. The change is not a formality. Last year the third vote came from poetic practice, this year it comes from literary scholarship, and those are two different ways of reading the same book.
Why the prize carries Drainac’s name
Rade Drainac, born Radojko Jovanovic, came into the world in 1899 in Trbunje near Blace and died in 1943 in Belgrade, where he is buried. He founded the journal Hipnos in 1922 and signed the collections “Afroditin vrt”, “Erotikon”, “Bandit ili pesnik” and “Srce na pijaci”. He worked as a reporter for Pravda, played the violin to silent films in Paris, and returned to Serbia with tuberculosis.
The festival that carries his name has been held in Prokuplje for more than half a century, and the prize goes to the best book of poems published the previous year in the Serbian-speaking region. The laureate will be named at the 57th Drainac Literary Meetings in late August.
For ten of the authors on the list that is the end of the road, for one it is a line in the biography that stays. Until then the only settled fact is the one such competitions rarely say out loud: 38 books are already out.
