Written by: Tomislav Marković
We don’t have official statistics, but Serbia is almost certainly the country with the most literary awards. Not per capita (per reader or writer) but in absolute numbers. Predrag Čudić compiled a thorough inventory of these accolades. In his book Advice to a Young Writer, or A Literary Primer, Čudić listed no fewer than 387 literary awards. At the time of publication – nearly three decades ago – that figure was accurate. Today, it’s anyone’s guess. The literary landscape is constantly shifting: old prizes fade, new ones emerge, and the entire scene remains lively and chaotic.
This decades-long inflation of literary awards has, quite predictably, devalued the works they honor, the writers who win them, and literature itself. When everything is a prizewinner, nothing is. That much is obvious. In such a disorderly system of recognition, it’s no wonder that absurdities, scandals, and shady dealings have piled up. At best, the awards often read as pure farce.
Consider, for example, the broader trend of linguistic archaism and a romanticized return to the medieval. Many awards now bear names that sound unintentionally comical to the modern ear: Žiča Chrysobull, Rača Charter, Theotokos of the Three Hands, Lady Despot Angelina, Echoes to Filip Višnjić, Njegoš’s Sparkle, Vidovdan Poetic Communion, Prince Lazar’s Golden Cross, Kosovka Girl’s Silver Goblet, Despot Stefan Lazarević’s Golden Pen, Despot Stefan Lazarević’s Golden Ring, Jefimija’s Embroidery – and the list goes on.
Custodians of the Kosovo Thought
But things have taken even darker, more absurd turns. Some awards were boycotted. Others dismissed outright as meaningless. Many were handed out for works of glaring mediocrity, with the literary shelf life of a mayfly. Sometimes, the winner was known in advance, the result of closed-door dealings. Clans handed prizes to one another, and ideological loyalty routinely trumped artistic merit.
Writers have received accolades for being “custodians of the Kosovo thought,” for speaking with “the voice of origin,” for possessing “an extraordinary intimacy with myth and history,” for poetic instincts that “reach back to the primordial darkness,” for romanticizing poetic outlawry and banditry, for seeing the world through a “national aura,” for being “linguists of our tragedy,” for crafting books where “all the characters read,” for writing poetry that functions as “a spiritual gathering of same-language kin for the highest possible energy exchange,” or for reviving “the totality of word, being, and language” through “lyrical expression of authentic spiritual direction combined with visionary insight” – and so on.
Poets who penned verses such as:
Serbia, heavenly orchard in earthly fruit, / Endure the trials and cosmic solitude
Before the Old Slavs, before Perun and Saint Vitus, / Princess Semiramis planted cherries here
Moral dilemmas aren’t easy, / Nor are killers masochists, / So they want to cleanse their conscience / For Hiroshima and Nagasaki – in Srebrenica
And I don’t like foreigners / Because I’m from a people / That is disappearing
…were generously rewarded.
The Bare Minimum
Worse things happened than merely rewarding nationalist verse. During the “national awakening,” the prestigious NIN Award went to a novel whose central aim was to portray Bosnian Muslims as a lesser race. Some decisions defied logic altogether – like awarding “Best Novel of the Year” to books that weren’t novels at all. It didn’t happen just once. It happened multiple times, with different juries.
In this carnival of deception, cronyism, and literary snake oil, there remained one uncrossable line: no award was ever given to a book that didn’t exist. The awarded book could be atrocious, incoherent, the wrong genre, dashed off in an alcoholic stupor, barely literate, blatantly bigoted, utterly provincial, or irrelevant – but it still had to be published. That was the bare minimum. A book that didn’t exist never received an award. Not even in a literary scene that long ago turned into a cemetery for language, spirit, and meaning.
Which is why the case of Bećir Vuković and his prize-winning The Houses of the Homeless – a book with a highly questionable ontological status – is so remarkable. Even Serbia’s most brazen literary parasites never dared to go that far: to award a major state prize to a book that doesn’t exist. No one ever crossed that line. Because even literary bureaucrats know their limits. They understood such a stunt would provoke universal outrage – even in a culturally comatose public.
Catching God by the Beard
There was no need for such blatant fraud, like awarding a book not published during the eligibility window, or one released afterward with a conveniently backdated publication date. Or whatever it was that happened in this bizarre literary detective story.
The system – what Danilo Kiš might have called the “literary Cosa Nostra” – functions simply. The jury or organizers decide in advance who will win. If the chosen author doesn’t yet have a book that meets the requirements, they’re informed in time to whip one up. The publisher is ready. The layout designer is on standby. The presses are warm. The writer cobbles together a poetry collection, however thin or lazy, and off it goes to print.
Today, it’s even easier. You don’t even have to write it yourself. Just ask ChatGPT to generate a “collection of poems,” and it’ll string together lines in roughly the right form. Honestly, the AI might do a better job than the award-winner in question. So why didn’t the organizers of the July 13th Award at least make that minimal effort – stick to the unwritten rules of cultural fraud? That’s the real mystery. Maybe they believe they’ve caught God by the beard and that their fire will burn till dawn. The world is theirs, as the much-loathed Westerners might say.
Oppressed Serbs in Serbia
Which brings us to the point. Our national apocalypse began with the myth of Serbian victimhood: the poor, persecuted Serbs, suffering at the hands of everyone else in the region. That narrative persists. The horsemen of the nationalist apocalypse have yet to come up with anything new.
But gentlemen, really – enough with that story. What you’re doing in Montenegro wouldn’t fly even for the most ideologically pure Serbs in Serbia. Not for professional Serbs – the ones who make a living from their Serbness. Not even Matija Bećković pulled anything like this. Nor did Dobrica Ćosić. Not the fathers of the nation, let alone their cousins, nephews, in-laws, or distant relatives.
Compared to Serbs in Serbia, you are a privileged class. You’re not oppressed. You enjoy rights that don’t exist anywhere else – not even in the homeland you supposedly revere. Not even in Mother Russia are there headlines about giving awards to books that don’t exist.
Instead of fighting for the “rights” of allegedly disenfranchised Serbs in Montenegro, you’d be better off focusing on the real rights of genuinely disenfranchised Serbs in Serbia.
Start by proposing a bold initiative: let every writer in Serbia whose primary profession is “being a Serb” receive any award they want, for a book they never wrote. Given the actual quality of the books they have written, it would be far more just for their unwritten books to win. And far easier on the readers.
Nonexistent Books
It’s a shame we’re wasting time on petty scandals and practically nonexistent writers when we could be discussing something far more fascinating: nonexistent books.
Nonexistent books – at least in literary terms – do exist. They’re fictional works by fictional authors that appear in actual literature. There’s Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, the lost volume of Encyclopaedia Britannica in Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, or the entire fabricated literary canon in Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas, complete with fictional far-right authors and their bibliographies.
Béla Hamvas didn’t just invent fictional authors – he wrote entire essays analyzing their imaginary books. Then there’s Morelli, the fictional writer beloved by the Serpent Club in Cortázar’s Hopscotch. And many of these invented books are genuinely good. For example:
“In one of his books, Morelli writes about a man in Naples who sat in front of his house for years, staring at a bolt in the ground. At night, he would remove the bolt and hide it under his mattress. At first, people laughed, mocked him, and grew angry – it became a symbol of civic neglect. Eventually, they shrugged it off. The bolt became peaceful. No one could walk by without noticing it and feeling that peace. The man died of a heart attack, and the bolt vanished the moment neighbors arrived. One kept it. Maybe he still takes it out in secret, stares at it, then hides it again before going to the factory, feeling something he can’t name. The only time he feels peace is when he looks at the bolt. He stares until he hears footsteps, then hides it in a rush. Morelli suggests it might be a god. But, he warns, that’s too easy. The real mistake is assuming it’s a bolt at all, just because it looks like one.”
There are entire fictional bibliographies, too. One of the funniest comes from Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel, with titles like: How to Spur Cheese, Heartburn and the Scourge of Curses, The Reek of Salvation, Priestly Messaflory, Toothgnashing Nihilisms, The Hollow Emptiness of Muddy Rantings, Smudgeometer of Pot Grumblings, and The Masquerade of Lascivious Aberrations and Malicious Indiscretions.
Had the jury awarded any of those books, it would have broken the rules – but at least it would have made more sense. And it would have better reflected the spirit of the country that once founded the July 13th Award. A country formerly known as the FNRJ – or, as Predrag Brebanović wittily reimagined it in his essay, Marko’s Ghosts: the Federated Surrealist Republic of Yugoslavia.
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