The Podgorica fair audience had a large number of opportunities to meet the writer Goran Petrović, who appeared at the 16th International Podgorica Book and Education Fair in the role of a guest who in a way opens this event, and during the first day of the fair, the audience had the opportunity to talk to the author and hear more about his creativity.
Speaking about Petrović's work, Prof. Dr Alexander Jerkov, presented him as the unequivocally greatest Serbian writer at the moment, and the author himself began his presentation with a question that, as he said, has been haunting him since his first book - when did I start writing?
"Wondering about when I started writing, I tried to remember when it was. At first I thought it was during my studies, but I soon remembered that it was sometime during high school, so that the age limit in my memory soon dropped to elementary school, fourth grade, when I published a sci-fi story in the local magazine. But I still think it was when I was six. I think that's the age, I couldn't write in the prenatal phase", Goran Petrović joked, answering himself and others to that stereotypical question that torments every writer.
He then read to the numerous fair audience a passage from his "Appendix to the Bibliography", a record he dedicated to this literary obsession.
Building on this passage, Jerkov joked that Petrović might actually be a "failed science fiction writer."
He, on the other hand, put Petrović in a frame of reference in which i Danilo Kiš, Borisav Pekić i Milorad Pavic. As he stated, they "speak through the creativity of Goran Petrović".
"What a compliment Goran Petrović is to Serbian literature. Kiš, Pekić, Pavić live through Petrović, their strength, that generation speaks through his voice. I don't know if anyone is a more imaginative writer than Goran Petrović, maybe even more imaginative than Pavić. He has a wonderful balance, literary maturity of the highest style, I will joke that there is no way he wrote bad poetry, as he says for himself, because he is a lyrical poetic soul," Jerkov pointed out.
Petrović spoke very vividly and inspiredly about the process of creation, which actually never ends with him.
"Stories are everywhere. I don't remember what I used to compare storytelling to. Maybe there's an ending that's dangling, so you pull it and start ripping the fabric. Sometimes I wonder, where do the words go. Why do we produce carbon monoxide, why don't we produce more words and more music? That's a question for a new civilization," said Goran Petrović, who exclusively shared with the audience of the Podgorica fair his impressions of how he experienced Podgorica, observing the Morača upstream and downstream and the rain of acacias.
He also stated that literature is our meeting place with ourselves. Speaking about the writing process, he shared with the audience that when writing novels, he tries to gain a certain amount of confidence in himself, so that "the reader will believe him".
Goran Petrović (Kraljevo, July 1, 1961) is a Serbian writer and academic. He is one of the most significant (and most widely read) Serbian writers of the younger generation of contemporary Serbian prose writers, a regular member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Petrović studied Yugoslav and Serbian literature at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Belgrade.
He published: the book of short prose "Advice for an easier life" (1989), the novel "Atlas described by the sky" (1993), the collection of short stories "Island and surrounding stories" (1996), the novel "Siege of the Church of Saint Savior" (1997), the novel "Sitničarnica 'Kod srečne ruke'" (2000), collection of short stories "Bližnji" (2002), collection of selected short prose "Everything I Know About Time" (2003), drama "Skela" (2004), collection of short stories "Differences" ( 2006) and the novella "Under the Peeling Ceiling" (2010).
The collection of short stories "Island and surrounding stories" is full of lavish imagination. Although the stories in it are diverse, they share the message that words make up the world. His books have been printed in over forty editions. Petrović's novels have been translated into Russian, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, English, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Belarusian, Greek, and Dutch.
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