Kristina Kljajić, BBC journalist
Return to Zadar, a Croatian city on the Adriatic coast, where he spent part of his childhood.
It was a moment that helped writer Darko Tuševljaković finish his novel Carrots, for which he received the 72nd NIN Award.
"It was only after that trip and visiting the city that it became clear to me what the backbone of the book should be," he explains in an interview with the BBC in Serbian.
At the center of the award-winning novel is the hero Davor, who, after almost several decades, returns to the city where he once lived, and had to leave it due to the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
"This encounter with space triggers everything that has been repressed," the author adds.
The characters are addressed by nicknames that bear traces of family and local history, such as the Italian name for carrots which becomes the name of one of the heroes, placed in the title.
"A person's relationship to their previous life, from which they were, for example, forcibly torn away, is something that obsessed me while I was designing Core", says Tuševljaković.
"All these people, including myself, were forced to instantly bury what they had been creating, erase the line they had been following, and, often in very poor conditions and without much choice, take a new path."
"And what will that life look like?"
"Will we be able to walk through it as if nothing had happened before, or will we compare each new day to those of the past, of which only a fragmentary memory remains, since everything material from them has disappeared?" he adds.
After years of delay, the hero returns to a place that has in the meantime been completely changed.
The search for former friends, a class teacher - everyone who, not always pleasantly, marked a part of growing up, with a touch of peer violence.
"Among some comments on the novel, I heard that the themes in the book are very difficult at times, but that the text is written in an easy-to-understand manner, and that the story is easy to absorb.
"Maybe that was the solution, to write about something important and difficult in a way that could be read relatively easily.", says Tuševljaković.
Who is Darko Tuševljavaković?
Darko Tuševljaković was born in 1978 in Zenica.
He spent his childhood in Makarska, near Split, and went to elementary school in Zadar.
Today he lives in Belgrade.
He published his first story in 2002 in the collection Bun(t)ovna p(r)ozand then came the novels The shadow of our desire, A precipice, Jaegermeister, Sublimeness, these collections witness Human vibrations, Posttruths i A hangar for dreams.
He received the "Lazar Komarčić" Award, the European Prize for Literature and the Andrić Award.
Roman Carrots It was also awarded the "Endless Blue Circle" award for the best novel in 2025, awarded by Matica Srpska, the Banat Cultural Center and the "Sumatra" organization.
The media attention that followed the NIN award hit him harder than he expected, he says with a casual smile.
His favorite interview is the one he gave for the high school magazine, he adds.
As we talk surrounded by books, it's easy to switch to a story about cats, and from the sphere of literature to the whole of popular culture.
Music and films equally interest and inspire him.
"All these artists have some kind of influence on me, so why not connect them?" - Ursula Le GuinBiosphere/Jonathan Glazer.
"Then: Graham Greene/The Dillinger Escape Plan/David Lynch. And let the third combination be: Emily St. John Mandel/Elbow/Stenl Kubrik.
"This game could be played to the point of unconsciousness," says the writer.
Tuševljaković works as a translator and editor.
"I write when I find the strength and time, and I don't have enough of either."
"Writing is usually incidental, which they say is quite in keeping with the times we live in, although I would feel better if it weren't," he explains.
He likes to write in silence, and music is acceptable, but it must be loud and instrumental - "to eliminate the rest of the world."
Carrots and memory
Core He wrote for about two years.
"For years I've been thinking about writing something about the city where I spent part of my childhood, the city I left without wanting to, and the memory of it."
"The setting is important and in the work it almost plays the role of an additional character. The influence of the environment on my characters is always great," the writer recalls.
The space of the city becomes an equal hero, and at the heart of the novel is the mystery of his character's missing memory.
"Memory, often unreliable and flawed, sets the characters on a physical and psychological journey through the city and their own past," explains the author.
In the novel, written in the first person, the hero leads us to various alleys and corners "chasing the ghosts of long-lost children," but these addresses repeatedly evoke unpleasant or painful feelings.
The apartments in that city are a mix of Yugoslav furniture and modern details from Ikea.
Without clear boundaries of time and space, they intertwine with broader political conflicts and the war that begins in the territory of the former common state.
A story about an interrupted childhood
"The children were playing and didn't know anything. We were those children. We didn't know that a volcano was smoldering beneath our feet that would scatter us like ashes."
Jadranka said we knew nothing and I was inclined to believe her.
In fact, I wanted to believe her, even though even then, as a boy, I knew about the soldiers in the lobby of the music school, the ones who questioned me and my mother about why we had come there.
But that was all I could know about then, about the shadows at the edge of my vision.
She also said that the adults were playing too, in front of an open flame.
They fueled it.
I couldn't quite believe it.
My parents knew nothing, just like the children, until the ground had already begun to crumble and split.
Even then they didn't understand why all this was happening.
Like many, they were caught off guard and unprepared, stopped in the middle of a movement, in the middle of a life that would not continue.
Those lives will be swallowed by the earth, and then new lives will come, filled with different, mostly pale colors."
Excerpt from the novel Carrots, publisher: Laguna.
- Bora Stanković, a writer who understood women
- Between sleep and death: Who was the Serbian poet Vladislav Petković Dis?
- Vladan Desnica: The rejected great of Yugoslav literature
Carrots is Tuševljaković's fourth or fifth attempt to write about Zadar, each time through a different story.
"A few years ago, for example, I wrote about a hundred pages of text before I realized that it just wasn't it."
"With this latest version, I felt pretty early on that it could work," he says proudly.
He physically visited the coastal city that resides in his memories a few years ago, and then it was his turn to make, as he says, a "literary visit."
"Therefore, I started from the location, but also from the idea of interrupted life paths."
"The idea of past lives dawned on me very early on - that phrase is most often used in a different context, but for me it served to denote the rift between parts of life that are often separated by such deep chasms that they can practically be called separate lives."
Magic wand above paper
Tuševljaković says that he feels completely free to mix genres and use all their elements that he needs for the story.
So they are in the story collection Hangar for dreams elements of horror, folklore and fantastic, and in the novel Sublimeness The technology is depicted in an almost dystopian manner.
"Over time, I stopped paying attention to any boundaries in that sense, since I believe that there are actually none, and that it depends only on the skill of the writer on how successful an amalgam he or she will create."
"I often emphasize in stories with fantasy elements that there is much inexplicable and irrational in life, in the world around us, and especially in ourselves," he says.
Even the most hardcore science fiction, set on the other side of the galaxy, in a generational spaceship, is "actually about us, here and now, or us forever and ever."
It may seem paradoxical, but reality is always an inspiration for him.
"We cannot escape the sensations that reach us, what our senses receive and what is stored in our body and mind."
"That's all we deal with, the only useful thing is the ability to formulate a meaningful sentence - so everything we write is in one way or another connected to the reality that surrounds us," he explains.
His fascination with other people's stories encouraged him to write himself since high school.
He admires the masters of storytelling and enjoys "the new horizons that each story and book opens up."
"When you see someone else do it well, you want to try it yourself, if only to see if you can wave a magic wand over paper in a similar way."
'Even a tweet can find a place in literature'
Tuševljaković also believes that there will always be people interested in books - in any form.
But he also emphasizes that literature is changing.
"New technologies bring new formats, which predominantly favor shorter forms, flash prose, dashes and, very interestingly, poetry."
"If you had asked someone in the 1990s what would happen to the poetry of 2020, they would probably have told you that no one would read it then, that poetry was something that belonged to the past, because it required a sensibility that modern man possesses less and less."
"When it happened, the exact opposite happened," he says.
That's why digital platforms can become like books, so that literature doesn't remain trapped in the passing of time.
"A tweet (a short post on the social network X, formerly Twitter) can be an art form, in a similar way to, say, an aphorism."
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube i Viber. If you have a topic suggestion for us, please contact bbcnasrpskom@bbc.co.uk
- Interview on Fridays with Uroš Dimitrijević: "Boards", the growing up of a millennial
- Writer Georgi Gospodinov for the BBC: "There is no great history without personal stories"
- Slobodan Tisma for the BBC: "We must not set any boundaries in art, if we do something, then we go to the limit"
- Writer Stevo Grabovac for the BBC: "I didn't become a writer, but a writer existed within me"
- Seven lesser-known details from the biography of the famous writer Meša Selimović
- The century of Vasko Popa, the artist who "thought with a song" and wrote to feel alive
Bonus video:
