Radoslav Vava Petković, one of the most significant contemporary Serbian writers, passed away today at the age of 72 in Novi Sad.
Radoslav Petković is the author of novels, short story collections, and essays. His books have been awarded the most prestigious literary prizes in the former Yugoslavia and later Serbia.
Radoslav Petković was born on July 21, 1953, in Belgrade. From 1983 to 1987, he was the editor-in-chief of the magazine Književna kritika (Literary Criticism). From 1988 to 1994, he worked as the secretary of the Ivo Andrić endowment. From 1994 to 2001, he worked as a freelance artist. From 2001 to 2004, he was the director-general of the Institute for Textbooks and Teaching Aids in Belgrade. His next job was, from February 2009 until his retirement in 2018, in the Provincial Secretariat for Culture of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, as deputy secretary and assistant.
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He published the novels “Put u Dvigrad” (1979), “Zapisi iz godine jagoda” (1983), “Senke na zidu” (1985), “Sudbina i komentari” (1993), “Savršeno sećanje na smrt” (2008), “Sudbina i komentari, dopunjeno izdanje” (2022).
His first novel won the “Miloš Crnjanski” award, and “Sudbina i komentari” was crowned with a large number of the most prestigious literary awards in Serbia: for this novel, Petković received the NIN Award for Novel of the Year, the “Meša Selimović” award, the Borba Award for Book of the Year, the award of the Jažbina club and Radio B92 for the best book of the year. On the occasion of the jubilee of the NIN Award, the novel “Sudbina i komentari” was, by the votes of literary critics, included in the top ten best NIN novels. For the novel “Savršeno sećanje na smrt”, he was, for the third time after “Senke na zidu” and “Sudbina i komentari”, in the shortlist for the NIN Award: the novel was awarded the “Bora Stanković” award in 2009. For his entire narrative opus, he received the “Ramonda serbica” award in 2008.
Petković is the author of two short story collections: “Izveštaj o kugi” (1989), for which he received the Andrić Award, and “Čovek koji je živeo u snovima” (1998), a work crowned with the Vital Award for Book of the Year.
He published the following essayistic books: “Ogled o mački” (1995), “O Mikelanđelu govoreći” (2006), “Vizantijski internet” (2007), “Upotreba vilenjaka” (2008) and “Kolumbovo jaje” (2017); his columns published in the Belgrade daily newspaper “Blic” were collected in the book “Događaj godine” (2010). In collaboration with the renowned Byzantinist Radivoje Radić, he published the book “Srednjovekovni putovođa” (2011). For the essay book “Kolumbovo jaje”, he received the “Dušan Vasiljev” award, and for the manuscript “Upotreba vilenjaka”, the “Istok-Zapad” award of the eponymous Zaječar library “Svetozar Marković”.
Radoslav Petković’s stories are included in several anthologies published in the country and abroad.
Radoslav Petković was also engaged in translation from English: he translated the prose of Tolkien, Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Daniel Defoe. During the 1990s, he was a columnist for NIN, the daily newspaper “Demokratija”, as well as a regular contributor to “Vreme” and “Evropljanin”. For more than ten years, he was a regular columnist for the most widely read Serbian daily newspaper “Blic”.
He lived and worked in Novi Sad.
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Source: Blic
Photo: Goran Srdanov / Ringier