Uglješa Šajtinac

WINNER

Uglješa Šajtinac portrait

Biography

Uglješa Šajtinac was born in 1971 in Zrenjanin. He graduated in 1999 from the Department of Dramaturgy, Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. He won the Josip Kulundžič award for the best student of dramaturgy, as well as the Slobodan Selenić award for the best graduation text.

Between 2003 and 2005, he was a dramaturge for the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad. He edited a collection of new dramatic texts by young authors, PROJEKAT 3, which were staged at the festival of the same name in May 2005 at the Serbian National Theatre. Since 2005, he has been teaching Dramaturgy at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad.

He has received the Biljana Jovanović literary award, the Vital Prize, and three screenplay awards (Novi Sad, Vrnjačka Banja and Warsaw). His drama Hadersfild (Huddersfield) won the Jovan Sterija Popović Award for the best contemporary dramatic text at the Sterijino Pozorje Festival in 2005. He has been a member of the Serbian Literary Association since 2007.

 

Nominated book : Sasvim skromni darovi (Quite Modest Gifts)

Summary

Quite Modest Gifts is a novel that draws its power from immediate and passionate experience, marked by impressive energy and sincere emotions. It is an epistolary novel in which two brothers exchange emails about their seemingly ordinary, but essentially unusual and exciting existence in Serbia and the United States. Through a form of family chronicle, the novel intertwines numerous narratives about the personal experiences of individual characters, while raising a number of challenging questions about the world we live in. By insisting on the key importance of family as the source and the outcome, as man’s elementary purpose, the author pushes to the background all other motives and problems, and reconciles all the opposites: from the generational gap to contrasts between the fervent centre, full of events, and the sleepy province; between the eastern cultural code and western mores, and between ideological differences and historical changes.

Sasvim skromni darovi book (Quite Modest Gifts) cover

Related publications

Various authors

Anthology
2014