Vilenica wraps up as awards are given out
Lipica/Štanjel, 8 September - Bosnian-Croatian writer Miljenko Jergović was given the Vilenica Prize as the 39th Vilenica International Literary Festival closed at Vilenica Cave near Lipica, SW, on Saturday evening. Poet Dominik Srienc received the Vilenica Crystal, which the festival gives to one of the authors presented in its annual collections of poems or texts.
Ljubljana
Writer Miljenko Jergović giving an interview to the STA earlier in the week.
Photo: Daniel Novakovič/STA
Štanjel
This year's winner of the Vilenica Crystal award, poet Dominik Srienc.
Photo: Slovenian Writers' Association
Ljubljana
Writer Miljenko Jergović giving an interview to the STA earlier in the week.
Photo: Daniel Novakovič/STA
Ljubljana
Writer Miljenko Jergović giving an interview to the STA earlier in the week.
Photo: Daniel Novakovič/STA
Ljubljana
Writer Miljenko Jergović giving an interview to the STA earlier in the week.
Photo: Daniel Novakovič/STA
In his acceptance speech, Jergović highlighted caves as places hiding thousands of stories which are yet to be told, including about atrocities from time immemorial.
From the times when people "inhabited our beautiful lands", including in the 20th century, they would take their unwanted neighbours to karst caves to kill them.
"We considered them guilty of something just as they considered us guilty of something," said Jergović, who made a name with his 1994 collection of short stories Sarajevo Marlboro about the Bosnian war.
Wondering who the real victim is, he said that "our very existence tells us that we are descendants of the killers and not of their victims".
Jergović, who had a Slovenian grandfather, labelled the karst caves as "our petrified conscience" and literature as what explores the human conscience.
He sees himself as a writer who tries to understand or reconstruct the reasons, emotions and inclinations of those who killed their neighbours above the caves.
The laureate received the prize for outstanding authors from Central Europe from the hands of Marij Čuk, vice-president of the Slovenian Writers' Association, which organises the festival.
The awards ceremony also saw Dušan Šarotar, the Slovenian author who was in this year's focus of the festival, read some of his work.
At a literary reading earlier in the day in Štanjel, Dominik Srienc, an ethnic Slovenian from the Austrian state of Carinthia, received the Vilenica Crystal.
The jury praised his poems as transcending the boundaries of language (he writes in Slovenian and German) and literature (his poems have been scored by the Carinthian Youth Choir).
His poems are also closely related to the festival's 2024 topic of Brave New World and to the place literature has at a time of the world's digital transformation.
Srienc, born in 1984 in Carinthia, where he lives and works, is also a translator, literary researcher and co-founder of several literary and cultural projects.
For his bilingual collection of poems from 2014, Here Is the End, he received the award of the Austrian Chancellor's Office for the best literary debut.
He is a member of the Association of Slovenian Writers in Austria, and curator of the literary segment of the festival TRIVIUM.