SACI instructor Dejan Atanackovic has won the 2018 NIN Award (Award for Best Novel of the Year) for his first novel Luzitanija.
The NIN Award is a prestigious Serbian (and previously Yugoslavian) literary award established in 1954 by the NIN weekly. The award is given annually for the best newly published novel in Serbian literature, presented every year in January by a panel of writers and critics. The literary website complete review called it the "leading Serbian literary prize" in 2012. In addition to being a highly acclaimed award capable of transforming writers' literary careers, the award is also sought after because it virtually assures bestseller status for the winning novel.
Dejan's novel Luzitanija brings together two apparently unrelated subjects of the First World War: the famous British passenger ship and Belgrade’s psychiatric hospital. In May 1915, under strange circumstances, Lusitania is sunk by a torpedo of a German submarine. In October the same year, Belgrade is conquered by the Austrian and German troops. The psychiatric hospital acquires an extraterritorial status, while on its soil an unusual parliamentary republic is formed by hospital’s staff and patients. This is the starting point, around which the novel develops into numerous stories, of searching and disappearing, of madness and progress, of the senselessness of war.
Photo H.N.
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