"Strada fortunata" by Olje Knežević in Budva

The promotion of Olje Knežević's novel "Strada fortunata" will be held today in Budva, organized by the Public Institution "Miroslav Luketić" at 19 p.m., in the children's department. The novel, published by the publishing house "Hena com" from Zagreb, for which Knežević won the Tportal award, will be discussed with the author by Đorđe Gregović and Stanka Stanojević.

"Moving through diverse perspectives without abandoning the first person, Knežević creates an impression of immediacy and authenticity, but this is only an illusion behind which, in the background, she destroys and rebuilds worlds and, searching for her fortunate fate, creates a carefully constructed depiction of an ambivalent female identity, torn between heritage and emancipation, between motherhood as strength and self-actualization as necessity, presenting it as a tangle of betrayed expectations, distorted perceptions and painful delusions. Her text is not so much a painting as a mirror in a house of mirrors: while one part of the object obediently reflects, other parts are uncompromisingly distorted into a caricature, evoking bittersweet recognition, pleasure and laughter in the reader," the jury's explanation stated earlier.

The description on the publisher's website states that it is partly a road novel, and partly a story about, by force of circumstances, displaced people from so-called transitional countries, while for the most part it is a text about a woman's acquisition of independence inevitably constrained by marriage to a dominant husband.

"They are not a couple who finish each other's sentences, but they know how to communicate in front of others without many words, which is a skill they acquired by living constantly on the move - on the roads across the Old Continent. He confidently behind the wheel, she in the back, first with one child, then with two. They are on the run, his head is on an unpublished political warrant, her task is to be his unconditional support, but the rebel sometimes snaps for a reason, she doesn't bite her tongue. He makes a lot of money, he wins at the casino, he knows everything about people and the world and selflessly passes all this knowledge on to her. She thinks of the poets she translated as a student, she longs for her hometown and the people she left there, she is the only real home for her children without a permanent home," the description reads.

Olja Knežević was born in Podgorica, graduated from California, and graduated from the Department of English Language and Literature at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. She worked as a translator of poetry and prose, a journalist and translator at Radio Brod, an assistant manager at the social assistance project of the Danish Refugee Council, and a teacher of English language and literature at a high school in Podgorica. She received her MA in Creative Writing in 2008 from Birkbeck College, University of London, and won the Overall Prize for her MA thesis that same year.

Her short story "The Classroom" was published in 2009 in Amnesty International's FREEDOM anthology, alongside stories by world-renowned authors. From 2010 to 2014, she wrote columns and stories for Art magazine, which resulted in the collection "London Stories of the South", published in 2013. So far, she has published the novels "Milena & Other Social Reforms", "Mrs. Black" and "Katarina, Big and Small". The latter was named the best novel of 2019 at the VBZ publishing house competition. The work was translated into English and published by Istros Books in the UK in 2020 and in German by eta Verlag in 2022.