Zarko just emailed this good news. His book with David Albahari, another remarkable Serbian writer and life-long friend, has just been awarded the prize for best non-fiction book of the year in Serbia.
From the jury’s explanation [google translate version]:
According to the opinion of the jury, among the successful non-fiction works of this year, the Book of Photography stands out for its unusual form and for the fruitful essay meeting of two constructed creative poetics.
At the beginning of the book there is a photo of “two men leaning against a wall who looked as if they would never move away from that wall”. But they moved away, and by how much: spatially speaking, one later reached Canada, and the other reached Germany. But the time gap is even more important: the we that is constituted in this photograph from 1984, now, almost four decades later, is just a picture of a split that is filled with conversation, correspondence, and the writing of the characters from the picture, Žarko Radaković and David Albahari. This conversation is in fact a book about photography that we are reading: each of the authors wrote eight essays, they are, along with the reproductions of the corresponding photographs, arranged alternately and are in agreement with each other, which achieves a double effect: we have in front of us very interesting separate units of text, but there are also dynamic connections between them, traces of intimate dialogue are felt, that particular tension that we usually encounter in epistolary novels, and not in non-fictional essay creations like this.
Zarko and Albahari have collaborated before:
See my thoughts on this book here.
It has been a distinct honor to collaborate with Zarko on our most recent We: On Friendship, coming soon from Elik Press.
THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY 