Jelena Lengold Wins Voja Colanovic Award

When it emerged a week ago that Dirac’s Equation by Jelena Lengold had made the shortlist for the Voja Colanovic award, it already looked like the jury only had to confirm what the literary world had suspected. Now the decision is official: the Serbian Literary Society has announced that this very collection of short stories, published by Arhipelag, was chosen as the best short story book of 2025.

The Serbian Literary Society established the Voja Colanovic award in 2024 to restore visibility to a genre that rarely gets a prize of its own: the short story. The first laureate was Marijana Canak, for the book Put od crvene cigle (The Road of Red Bricks), and last year the honor went to Veselin Markovic for the collection Crna jedra (Black Sails). Lengold is now the third writer to win the prize since it was founded.

The award is named after a writer whose prose, as the society that grants it describes him, was marked by elegance of spirit, mastery of language and narrative insight. It is reserved exclusively for books of short stories, a genre that in Serbia rarely gets a stage of its own outside the broader competitions built around the novel. Unlike the NIN Award, which has tracked the novel for decades, short fiction had no major prize to call its own until the Voja Colanovic award was founded, despite Serbia’s long tradition of short story writers.

The decision came in two stages. Forty five books were submitted for the competition. The jury, made up of Ljubica Arsic as president along with Srdjan Vucinic and Srdjan Tesin, first narrowed the field to eight titles, and on August 20 announced a shortlist of three. The final decision followed six days later. Alongside Dirac’s Equation, the shortlist included books by two writers both named Dejan: Homunkulus by Dejan Aleksic (Imam ideju, Kraljevo) and Kuke i verige (Hooks and Chains) by Dejan Mihailovic (Laguna).

Explaining the choice, the jury described Lengold’s collection as a combination of literary maturity, a developed and cultivated style, deep emotional honesty and an exceptional narrative eye for detail. They also spelled out why they found that combination so convincing.

Lengold’s stories paint, in a suggestive and recognizable way, without sentimentality or pathos, aging, the unease of thinking about the finiteness of life and love, cracks in marriage, loneliness, but also the need for closeness.

The decision, the jury noted, was unanimous.

This is not the first recognition Dirac’s Equation has brought Jelena Lengold. The collection had earlier made the shortlist for the Golden Sunflower award, and the story Cokolada (Chocolate) from the same book had already won her the Grigorije Bozovic award. Two awards and one shortlist appearance in under a year since publication are no small feat for a short story collection, a genre that in Serbia rarely reaches wider reading circles beyond those who read stories for professional reasons.

What the jury names as the strength of the collection, aging, unease before finiteness, cracks in marriage and the need for closeness despite it all, also reads as the poetics Lengold keeps returning to from book to book. This time, judging by the jury’s statement, she has brought it to a form convincing enough to win over a strict jury of her own peers. When a writer returns to the same themes in a different language and does not repeat herself, that is a sign that it is the storytelling, not the subject, carrying the book, and storytelling craft is exactly what the jury singled out in its statement. For readers, that means one thing: after two awards and one shortlist for the same book, Dirac’s Equation is worth seeking out before it is talked about again.