Slobodan Tisma Receives “Ramonda Serbica” Award in Sicevo
Slobodan Tisma receives the “Ramonda Serbica” award tonight in Sicevo, at the opening of the 35th International Literary Colony dedicated to Milan Rakic and Borisav Stankovic.
When the jury of the “Ramonda Serbica” award explained this year’s decision, it wrote a line that could stand as a short history of Serbia’s literary margins: the prize goes to a writer who turned his own margin into the center of a distinctive poetics. Tonight that line gets a name and an address. Slobodan Tisma, the poet, prose writer and conceptual artist from Novi Sad, receives the honor at 7 p.m., at the ceremonial opening of the 35th International Literary Colony Sicevo, held at the Art Colony in the Sicevo Gorge.
The ceremony is scheduled for Tuesday, September 15, at exactly 7 p.m. Alongside the “Ramonda Serbica” award, the evening will also hand out the “Sicevo Visions” recognition, after which all of this year’s colony participants will be introduced.
Tisma is one of the more recognizable names on the Novi Sad cultural scene, with a body of work spanning decades that refuses to settle into a single medium. His output covers poetry and prose as well as conceptual art, and the jury points to exactly that mix of artistic forms as one of the hallmarks of his work.
The laureate was chosen unanimously by a jury made up of Milena Markovic, last year’s winner, Zvonko Karanovic and Dalibor Popovic Pop. In their statement, they singled out the authorial distance, irony, fragmentation, musicality and poetic sensitivity in Tisma’s writing, concluding that his work has shifted the boundaries between literary genres.
“Combining authorial distance, irony, fragmentation, musicality and a heightened poetic sensitivity, Slobodan Tisma has created a body of work in which genre boundaries have become secondary to the power of the creative voice,” the jury’s statement reads.
The line about the margin and the center, the one that opens this piece, closes that same statement: “For a body of work whose aesthetic depth has marked an important part of contemporary Serbian literature, the award goes to a writer who has turned his own margin into the center of a distinctive literary poetics,” the jury concluded.
This year’s anniversary edition of the colony is titled “In the Homeland of Modernism” and is dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the births of Milan Rakic and Borisav Stankovic. The theme was not chosen at random: organizers are presenting it as an occasion to revisit literary modernism in Serbia, its shifts and its influence on contemporary writing, with the program framed as a dialogue between the era in which Rakic and Stankovic wrote and what has survived from that era to today.
Sources do not fully agree on how long the colony runs. One announcement lists the program from September 14 to 20, with an opening segment already on Monday, September 14, at the Nis Cultural Center. Another ties the colony’s program to September 15 through 20, leaving out Monday altogether. The award ceremony for Tisma itself, on Tuesday evening, stays put in both versions, at the same place and the same time, September 15 at 7 p.m.
The program continues on Wednesday, September 16, with a conversation with Tisma at the Nis Cultural Center at 7:30 p.m., joined by Tamara Krstic. Thursday, September 17, brings two conversations: at 6 p.m., a meeting with Danish writer Jens Fink-Jensen, followed at 7:30 p.m. by a conversation with Enes Halilovic about his book “Bekos.”
From Serbia, alongside Tisma, the colony’s participants include Enes Halilovic, Tamara Krstic, Nikola Trific, Nevena Milosavljevic, Mladen Sljivovic and Sasa Budjevac. The list of foreign guests carries one correction to what had previously circulated as the announcement: from Copenhagen, Denmark, comes Jens Fink-Jensen; from Skopje, North Macedonia, Frosina Parmakovska and Milutin Stancic; from Zagreb, Croatia, Maja Rucevic Karanovic. Writer Zeljko Mitic, whom one earlier announcement mistakenly placed in the Zagreb delegation, actually comes from Jessheim, Norway.
The program in Sicevo and Nis is led by Velibor Petkovic and Milena Misic Filipovic, editor of the Literary Program at the Nis Cultural Center, and admission to all colony events is free. The 35th International Literary Colony Sicevo is sponsored by the City of Nis, with support from the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia. It is organized by the Nis Cultural Center, with the Society of Writers and Literary Translators of Nis as co-organizer.
