Lidija Dimkovska
WINNER
WINNER
Biography
Lidija Dimkovska was born in 1971 in Skopje, Macedonia. She is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. She studied Comparative Literature at the University of Skopje and took a PhD in Romanian Literature at the University of Bucharest, Romania. She has worked as a lecturer of Macedonian language and literature at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest, and as a lecturer of World Literature at the University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia. Since 2001 she has been living in Ljubljana, Slovenia, as a freelance writer and translator of Romanian and Slovenian literature into Macedonian. She has participated at numerous international literary festivals and was a writer-in-residence in Iowa, Berlin, Graz, Split, Vienna, Salzburg, Tirana, Okinawa, and London. She was a member of the international jury for Herbert Award in Poland, a member of the jury for Petru Krdu Award in Serbia and the president of the jury for the Vilenica international literary award in Slovenia.
Her EUPL winning novel A Spare Life was firstly published in Macedonian in 2012, and so far has five editions in Macedonian. It received also the Writers Association of Macedonia Award for best prose of 2013 and was long listed for the Best Translated Book Award in the USA. A screenplay based on the novel is available, too.
Nominated book : РЕЗЕРВЕН ЖИВОТ (A Spare Life)
Summary
A Spare Life is an original story about two Macedonian Siamese twins joined at the head, Srebra and Zlata, and their struggle for individuality, privacy and a life of their own. The story is told by Zlata and begins in 1984, in a June suburban afternoon in Skopje, and it ends on August 18, 2012, at the exact same location. The game the characters play is the same: Fortune Telling (who’s going to marry whom, at what age, how many children will they have, what city will they live in and will their husbands be rich or poor). Later in the novel, their prophecies come true, but in a tragic fashion. In the beginning, Srebra and Zlata (the names are a play on ‘silver’ and ‘gold’, respectively) get to play the game; in the end, it belongs to Zlata’s daughters, Marta and Marija, also twins. The circle is complete, including 28 years of living, growing, suffering pain, and experiencing love and hate. There is also darkness due to death, the separation of conjoined twins, and the break-up of joint Yugoslav republics and autonomous regions. Srebra is left on the outside: the circle closes without her, for she ‘does not survive’, much like the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after its split. Up to 1996, the action takes place in Skopje, Macedonia, and from 1996 to 2012 in Skopje and London. The novel takes in the death of a child, the heavy burden of guilt, hatred, weddings and funerals, incest, murder, passport falsification, a poverty of the soul disguised as social poverty, faith and God, holidays and traditions, masturbation, family dysfunction to the nth degree, and acculturation. The novel is a personal, political, and historical story about the time we live in and the people we identify with.
Related publications
EUPL Anthology 2013
Various authors