István Turczi receives one of the most prestigious Serbian literary awards

István Turczi receives one of the most prestigious Serbian literary awards

Almost all Serbian media and cultural news portals have reported that Hungarian poet István Turczi, winner of the Attila József, the Beaver’s Wreath and the Prima Primissima prizes, will receive the Brankovo kolo international literary prize, named after the Serbian romantic poet Branko Radičević, one of the greatest figures of Serbian literature, who was born 200 years ago this year.

The event, which commemorates the memory and work of Branko Radičević (1824-1853), has become the largest cultural festival in Serbia. Every September, three cities – Karlovy Vary, Strasilovo and Novi Sad – host music, literature, theatre and visual arts events that attract large crowds. Brankovo kolo was originally a literary magazine published in Karlovy Vary between 1895 and 1914. Keeping the original name, an international grand prize and several national literary prizes have been awarded every year since 2006. Previous recipients include Carol Ann Dufy, the first female laurel poet from Scotland, Jürgen Israel, the renowned German poet-publicist, the Armenian poet-translator Babken Simonyan, the Russian poet Vyacheslav Kupriyanov, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize-winner Olga Martinova, who was born in the Soviet Union but lives in Frankfurt, and the representative of Montenegrin literature, Budimir Dubak.

This year’s prize is particularly significant because it is a bicentenary year, the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Serbian classic. and on this occasion, the three-member jury awarded the Grand Prize to István Turczi on the basis of his three previous books published in Serbian. According to their reasoning, “the Hungarian poet’s oeuvre is an extremely complex, world-literary representation and summation of the worldview of a modern European man, who was educated in the West, but at the same time had deep Eastern European experiences.”

The award ceremony will be held in 2024 with a lot of press coverage. will take place on 16 September at 11 am in the main hall of the famous Karlovy Vary High School, where the Serbian poet attended secondary school. On this occasion, István Turczi’s fourth book of 77 poems in Serbian will be published in a special edition, based on the dedicated work of the translator Illés Fehér from Freetown.