Every year, France, Japan, Brazil and more crown their best book. Spin the globe to see which ones you can read in English, and which are still waiting.
4,667 books · 44 prizes · 39 countries
NIN 2025 · Winner
Darko Tuševljaković · 47 when first published
Novel · 257 pages · War, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Years after the war ended his childhood in sunny Zadar, where he ran with a gang of thirteen-year-olds, Davor travels back from Belgrade with his girlfriend Nina in search of answers about his old friends.
NIN 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Ballad of a Killer and a Killer and a Killer”
Dalibor Pejić · 41 when first published
Novel · 207 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Three strangers, each carrying a past and a guilt, meet on the road to the sea: Relja, fleeing the humiliations of transitional Belgrade, Jana, driven by grief and revenge, and Pepolo, who chases a butterfly that perhaps only he can see.
NIN 2025 · Shortlist
Frau Beta
Laura Barna · 61 when first published
Novel · 202 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:The Bavarian-born painter Babette Bachmayer, who became Beta Vukanović in Belgrade, and a gifted milkmaid from Vinča cross paths through a painting, in a documentary novel spanning Serbia from the late 19th century to 1972.
NIN 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Immortal Follies of Mrs Kubat”
Milan Tripković · 48 when first published
Novel · 222 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:After losing her job at a bank, Marija Kubat finds comfort in books of positive psychology and sets out, like a knight errant, to help the unfortunate in a country steeped in lies, violence and injustice.
NIN 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Abbey of Saint Bartholomew”
Miloš Perišić · 33 when first published
Novel · 317 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Miloš travels from the Netherlands through France, Italy and Greece to a monastery in Serbia, shedding at each stop a layer of the identity that others, above all his Dutch lover Ruther, have projected onto him.
NIN 2025 · Shortlist
Razgovori s Vješticom
Title translated by AI:“Conversations with the Witch”
Vladimir Vujović · 34 when first published
Novel · 153 pages
AI-generated summary:In ten conversations held between 1980 and 2019, the painter Vid Latinović talks with a mysterious figure called the Witch about his art, his struggles and the times that shaped him.
NIN 2024 · Winner
NGDL
Marinko Arsić Ivkov · 74 when first published
Novel · 195 pages · War, Satire
AI-generated summary:Through war and absurdity, a pigeon fancier goes in search of his Serbian high-flying pigeon, in a picaresque novel of travel and wandering set in the 1990s.
NIN 2024 · Shortlist
Lutam sad mrtav svetom
Title translated by AI:“Now I Wander the World Dead”
Borivoj Gerzić · 65 when first published
Novel · 175 pages
AI-generated summary:Subtitled a chronicle of death and madness, a novel of death and desire, meaninglessness and the sky, in which ghostly and comic scenes alternate with reflections on life, the world, death, men and women.
NIN 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Tin Coffin for Zejna Zaimović”
Muharem Bazdulj · 47 when first published
Novel · 144 pages · War, Migration
AI-generated summary:A first-person narrator who lost no one in the war and suffered no particular harm himself is nonetheless shaped by its trauma and by the loss of the home of his youth.
NIN 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Bird Flies Along a Sharp Knife”
Tanja Stupar Trifunović · 47 when first published
Novel · 142 pages · Coming of age, War
AI-generated summary:Vanja grows up beside Milena, the girl with blue eyes, in times fit for anything but growing up, with the army, the sea, first loves and, in the background, war and exile.
NIN 2023 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“After the Party”
Stevo Grabovac · 45 when first published
Novel · 396 pages · War, Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A writer, son of a writer, sets out to tell the story of a terrible wartime crime, the killing of Roma children, and in doing so pieces together his father's life, his friendships and his own growing up.
NIN 2023 · Shortlist
U zemlji Franje Josifa
Title translated by AI:“In Franz Joseph Land”
Ljubomir Koraćević · 41 when first published
Novel · 143 pages
AI-generated summary:Milošević, a construction technician who designs windows for a firm that demolishes buildings to put up new ones, is at odds with his trade, his age and his partner Julijana, and longs to escape.
NIN 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Self-Dissection”
Srđan Srdić · 46 when first published
Novel · 116 pages · Autofiction, Satire
AI-generated summary:A writer who shares the author's name sets himself the task of writing a book of exactly two hundred thousand characters with spaces, and shows and comments on himself as he works.
NIN 2023 · Shortlist
Vladan Matijević · 61 when first published
Novel · 310 pages · War, Crime
AI-generated summary:A traumatised veteran of the fighting at Pakrac spends his days outside Belgrade's Đeram market among drifters, dealers and beggars, addressing a long monologue to Pepi, his comrade from the front.
NIN 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Song of Three Worlds”
Vladimir Pištalo · 63 when first published
Novel · 307 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Ozana Bolica, a curious and gifted woman from Perast in the Bay of Kotor, is made a slave and carried across three worlds, from Venice and Tunis to Salem, in an age of empire, piracy and witch hunts.
NIN 2022 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Inner Sea”
Danica Vukićević · 63 when first published
Novel · 216 pages
AI-generated summary:Hundreds of short titled prose pieces, six or seven to a page, on literature and its vanities, faith, East and West, fear, violence, class, politics and feminism, which together build up a whole picture of the world.
NIN 2022 · Shortlist
Papir sa vodenim znakom
Title translated by AI:“Watermarked Paper”
Goran Petrović · 61 when first published
Novel · 158 pages · Historical · Roman delta, book 1
AI-generated summary:At the start of the 15th century, Queen Giovanna II of Naples sets out in person for Amalfi, whose papermakers' guild chooses carefully whom it will sell to, to buy the finest paper for a love letter.
NIN 2022 · Shortlist
Marijana Čanak · 40 when first published
Novel · 202 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:The story of Klara, whose gift for singing is reined in by a repressive mother, and of her search for the woman she wants to be, told partly through the eyes of her twin brother Klaus.
NIN 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Club of True Creators”
Milan Tripković · 45 when first published
Novel · 165 pages · Satire, Crime
AI-generated summary:In Novi Sad, a chance encounter at the railway station between the self-proclaimed bard Voja Počuča and an old secret-police agent with war crimes to his name turns into a comedy of errors when the agent is run over by a car.
NIN 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“No One Is Forgotten and We Remember Nothing”
Mirjana Drljević · 51 when first published
Novel · 262 pages · Crime, Coming of age, Family
AI-generated summary:An investigation into the disappearance of three girls unfolds among the bleak tower blocks of New Belgrade, a story of growing up, lifelong friendships and the tangled bonds between parents and children.
NIN 2022 · Shortlist
Koljka i Sašenjka
Uglješa Šajtinac · 51 when first published
Novel · 158 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:In the family house during the coronavirus pandemic, the narrator finds a list of chores written by his late uncle Konstantin, called Koljka, for a week in September that has already passed, and begins to remember him.
NIN 2021 · Winner
Deca
Milena Marković · 47 when first published
Novel · 216 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A novel in verse about femininity, motherhood and being a daughter and a son, following a family through a history that begins with the Second World War, runs through the 1980s of the narrator's youth and overwhelms everyone in the 1990s.
NIN 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Afterword”
David Albahari · 73 when first published
Novel · 108 pages
NIN 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“That Which Cannot Be Spoken Of”
Elvedin Nezirović · 45 when first published
Novel · 212 pages · War, Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:The narrator tells of the lives and deaths of those closest to him, and of crimes against civilians committed by all three sides in the Bosnian war, refusing the local wisdom that silence is the only way to forget.
NIN 2021 · Shortlist
Ilija Đurović · 31 when first published
Novel · 103 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:In twenty-four hours told in a single sentence, a twenty-eight-year-old narrator and his girlfriend drive the Montenegrin coast from Ada Bojana to Kotor and return to their native Podgorica over Lovćen and Cetinje.
NIN 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Mokrin Chronicles”
Srđan V. Tešin · 50 when first published
Novel · 125 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:The private history of a boy, of the place where he grows up, Mokrin, and of a generation, from the upheavals of the 1980s to the dramas of the 1990s.
NIN 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Spanish Boot”
Vladimir Kopicl · 72 when first published
Novel · 147 pages · Coming of age, Love
AI-generated summary:One summer at the end of the 1970s, two young Yugoslavs, not quite a couple, go to a New Age eco-commune in Austria to experience true freedom.
NIN 2020 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Counter-Endorphin”
Svetislav Basara · 67 when first published
Novel · 292 pages · Satire, Historical
AI-generated summary:The painter Stojković, an invented character and Ivo Andrić's secret friend, narrates a grotesque history in which Serbia's national greats appear among levitations, repeated resurrections and impossible liaisons.
NIN 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Nothing Belongs to Anyone”
Bojan Savić Ostojić · 37 when first published
Novel · 231 pages
AI-generated summary:A bookish narrator spends his days at Belgrade's flea markets hunting and haggling for old books, while wondering what has become of Ćoka, who said she was leaving for a few days and has been gone for months.
NIN 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Why Do You Sleep on the Floor”
Darko Cvijetić · 52 when first published
Novel · 110 pages · War, Family
AI-generated summary:The narrator, Darko, follows his brother Boto, their parents and their grandmothers as fear of the coming war grows and their country breaks apart, moving between the 1990s, the Second World War and the early 2000s.
NIN 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“People Without Graves”
Enes Halilović · 43 when first published
Novel · 246 pages · Family, Crime
AI-generated summary:A young man whose beloved is promised to another takes up his rifle and turns outlaw; decades later his son, the narrator, sets out to reconstruct the forty-seven-day manhunt for his father.
NIN 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Under Both Suns”
Ognjen Spahić · 43 when first published
Novel · 137 pages · War, Family
AI-generated summary:Demoted for opposing the abuse of prisoners of war at the Morinj camp, former army captain Bato Lončar lives with his wife Danica at an Adriatic lighthouse, until two young campers with a failing marriage turn up in their yard.
NIN 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Beautiful Ruins”
Savo Stijepović · 50 when first published
Novel · 365 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:A road-trip search for the vanished novelist Martin Koman leads to a hippie commune in early-1970s California, led by the preacher Skip Lenski.
NIN 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Freedom of Speech”
Vladan Matijević · 58 when first published
Novel · 300 pages · Crime, Politics
AI-generated summary:When the journalist Čomski mysteriously disappears, the story of his friendship since student days with his colleague Vladimir F. unfolds amid journalism entangled with political interests up to the highest levels of power.
NIN 2019 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Dog and the Double Bass”
Saša Ilić · 47 when first published
Novel · 303 pages · Politics, War
AI-generated summary:A jazz double bassist who no longer plays, the instrument long grown onto his back, leads the way through places his society would rather forget, from a Yugoslav navy warship and the asylum in Kovin to the refugee-filled port of Genoa.
NIN 2019 · Shortlist
Yugoslav
Ana Vučković · 35 when first published
Novel · 138 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:An elegy for the time the narrator spent with her father, above all in the Yugoslavia that was destroyed, recalled not from study but from memories that still hurt.
NIN 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Through Forests and Mountains”
Milenko Bodirogić · 55 when first published
Novel · 164 pages · Politics, Historical
AI-generated summary:Two men walk the mountains and forests of the country that no longer exists: Rajić, a walker and pilgrim of the revolution, and his chronicler, in search of the names and fates of the early Partisan movement.
NIN 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Horror, or...”
Slobodan Tišma · 73 when first published
Novel · 234 pages · War
AI-generated summary:Voices from different ages of one life take turns: a child left by his parents in a children's home, a boy who escapes violence to eastern Bosnia, a young man who goes to war or imagines it, and an old man who wants but fears to write about Srebrenica.
NIN 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Mulatto, an Albino, a Mosquito”
Stevo Grabovac · 41 when first published
Novel · 171 pages · War, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In present-day Bosanski Brod, a man who was too young to fight in the war but old enough to remember everything scrapes by on small deals, while memories of how the war began and of lost chances keep returning.
NIN 2018 · Winner
Vladimir Tabašević · 32 when first published
Novel · 194 pages · War, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:With the legend of Saint Sebastian as its undertext, a novel about the wars of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia and about people who see themselves as righteous saviours or as victims.
NIN 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Too Late”
Branka Krilović · 68 when first published
Novel · 146 pages
AI-generated summary:Subtitled an old-fashioned novel, a book of life and death, youth and ageing, love and loneliness, built from finely detailed scenes of gradual loss, illness and pain.
NIN 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Belgrade Trio”
Goran Marković · 72 when first published
Novel · 197 pages · Historical, Love, Politics
AI-generated summary:In Belgrade in the late 1940s, the writer Lawrence Durrell, then a British embassy official, begins an affair with the wife of a high-ranking functionary who is soon sent to the Goli Otok prison camp.
NIN 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Giving Up”
Jelena Lengold · 59 when first published
Novel · 148 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:A woman's life in three ages, as a girl, a young woman and a mature woman, told through memories of childhood and growing up, of past loves that were never forgotten, and of a family history that has to be told.
NIN 2018 · Shortlist
Uhvati zeca
Lana Bastašić · 32 when first published
Novel · 256 pages · War, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Twelve years after their friendship broke off, Lejla calls Sara in Dublin to say that her brother Armin, long believed killed in the Bosnian war, is in Vienna, and the two women set out together from Mostar to find him.
NIN 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Tenth Life”
Saša Savanović · 32 when first published
Novel · 143 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A young woman who works for a non-governmental organisation, and is growing sick of it, drifts through present-day Belgrade, its night wanderings and an on-and-off love affair with a certain Vincent.
NIN 2017 · Winner
Dejan Atanacković · 48 when first published
Novel · 213 pages · War, Historical, Speculative
AI-generated summary:During the First World War the Belgrade psychiatric hospital, the one place in occupied Serbia left outside the occupier's control, becomes, in this fantastical tale, a republic of free and equal doctors and patients.
NIN 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Today Is Wednesday”
David Albahari · 69 when first published
Novel · 155 pages · Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:A man from Zemun on the threshold of old age devotes himself to caring for his elderly father, who has Parkinson's disease, and as the father's body fails, his past comes to light.
NIN 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Relatives”
Jovica Aćin · 71 when first published
Novel · 196 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Learning that the story of his family's origins leads all the way to the Pyrenees, the hero, who shares the author's surname, sets off for Spain with his sons to look for their lost ancestors.
NIN 2017 · Shortlist
Gorgone
Mira Otašević · 73 when first published
Novel · 147 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:The lives of writers, actors, musicians, painters, lovers, soldiers, executioners and victims, Brecht, Beuys and Django among them, collide in an age bounded by the world wars, the destructive ones and the cold one.
NIN 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Silver Mist Is Falling”
Srđan Srdić · 40 when first published
Novel · 258 pages
NIN 2016 · Winner
Ivana Dimić · 59 when first published
Novel · 206 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A daughter lives with and cares for her elderly mother, whose dementia is advancing, in a novel told mostly in dialogue and set against short prose pieces that keep returning to the life of Emily Dickinson.
NIN 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“An Encounter in Unusual Circumstances”
Vladan Matijević · 54 when first published
Novel · 197 pages · Love, Speculative
AI-generated summary:On 9 July 2015 Ana Žeželj smokes, drinks beer and waits, as always, for a call from Marjan, who vanished more than half a century ago; this time she feels a pain in her chest and sees a being with ash-grey wings in her bathroom.
NIN 2016 · Shortlist
Vladimir Tabašević · 30 when first published
Novel · 189 pages · Love, Family
AI-generated summary:Emil, a young writer who believes he is a genius, is paid to turn a retired colonel's memories into a book, and falls into a passionate affair with Ana, the old man's carer.
NIN 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Chronicle of Doubt”
Vladislav Bajac · 62 when first published
Novel · 406 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A chronicle of one family's life and of a vanished country, following a son's growing up, maturing and decline against the grand illusions of his father's generation.
NIN 2015 · Winner
Islednik
Dragan Velikić · 62 when first published
Novel · 266 pages · Family, Autofiction, Historical
AI-generated summary:News of his mother's death reaches a writer in Budapest and leads him to open the black box of the family's past, tracing her life and a vanished world.
NIN 2015 · Shortlist
Dana Todorović · 38 when first published
Novel · 130 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:The renowned chess grandmaster Sopoćin arrives at Logovskaya Park for a tournament lasting several days, in which he will play against a motley crowd of characters who together stand for the people.
NIN 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Gates of Paradise”
Ljubica Arsić · 60 when first published
Novel · 322 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Drinking wine in a Florence trattoria, Đurđa finds a tablet someone has left on the next chair; what it holds sets her searching for a past that turns out to matter for her own life.
NIN 2015 · Shortlist
La sans pareille
Milisav Savić · 70 when first published
Novel · 271 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Out of the chaos and blood of the Balkan civil war, Hasan Prtinac travels to Tuscany in search of beauty and art, to be renewed there and to come to know himself.
NIN 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Angel of the Assassination”
Svetislav Basara · 62 when first published
Novel · 270 pages · Satire, Historical
AI-generated summary:From beyond the grave, Archduke Franz Ferdinand dictates to his posthumous secretary his own account of the Sarajevo assassination, its causes and its consequences.
NIN 2015 · Shortlist
Republika Ćopić
Title translated by AI:“The Ćopić Republic”
Vule Žurić · 46 when first published
Novel · 191 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Subtitled a national liberation novel in nine offensives, a spiritual biography of the writer Branko Ćopić that brings back to life the worlds he lived in through imagination and the dream world he fought for.
NIN 2014 · Winner
Kuća sećanja i zaborava
Filip David · 74 when first published
Novel · 153 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:In 1942, after losing his parents and his little brother Elijah, the Jewish boy Albert Weiss turns down the chance to take a German family's missing son's place; decades later, in New York, he stumbles on a house that keeps the memory of history.
NIN 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Animal Kingdom”
David Albahari · 66 when first published
Novel · 126 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:In the early 1970s a conscript, a frightened conformist who played a small part in the 1968 student protests, serves in an army barracks in Banja Luka, where a dark, violent schemer draws him into a closed little group.
NIN 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Sabo Has Stopped”
Oto Horvat · 47 when first published
Novel · 132 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Told in fragments rather than a straight line, a novel not about a death itself but about what it leaves behind for the man who loved her.
NIN 2013 · Winner
Tai
Goran Gocić · 51 when first published
Novel · 294 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A Western man adrift in the bar scene of Bangkok falls for a Thai woman and sets out to protect her, an undertaking that steadily unsettles his ideas about East and West, about women and about himself.
NIN 2013 · Shortlist
Zlatno doba
Title translated by AI:“The Golden Age”
Silvana Hadži-Đokić · 50 when first published
Novel · 298 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:A historical novel about the emperor Constantine and the empress Helena.
NIN 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“We, the Erased”
Slobodan Vladušić · 40 when first published
Novel · 294 pages · Crime, Speculative
AI-generated summary:In the virtual city of Metropolis a man called M. P. meets a worried young woman; the same night he finds a Facebook story about a girl thrown naked from a moving car into the snow, and sets out to find her.
NIN 2013 · Shortlist
Vazdušni ljudi
Title translated by AI:“The Air People”
Sonja Atanasijević · 51 when first published
Novel · 203 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:After an abortion, a young woman begins to see a little girl she believes is her unborn child; weighed down by guilt, she starts searching through her own past and her own self.
NIN 2012 · Winner
Veliki rat
Aleksandar Gatalica · 48 when first published
Novel · 414 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:Following more than seventy characters on every side of the First World War, from crowned heads and generals to opera singers, spies, soldiers and shopgirls, the novel tells the four years of the war across all of Europe's fronts.
NIN 2012 · Shortlist
Veprovo srce
Title translated by AI:“The Boar's Heart”
Drago Kekanović · 65 when first published
Novel · 158 pages · War, Nature, Migration
AI-generated summary:Twenty years after the war in Croatia began, four exiled friends meet at a wedding in Vienna, where Ranko Musulin tells of the hunt for a huge boar that unfolded on Mount Papuk as the first shots were fired in Slavonia.
NIN 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Misfortune and Real Needs”
Ivančica Đerić · 43 when first published
Novel · 319 pages · War, Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:The outbreak of war in 1992 halts the career of Una, a young Yugoslav comic-book artist, and a harmless poster sets off events that are resolved only twenty years later in Vancouver.
NIN 2012 · Shortlist
Štampar i Veronika
Title translated by AI:“The Printer and Veronika”
Novel · 286 pages · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:Between Venice and Constantinople at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Božidar Vuković of Podgorica, a young exile devoted to books, seeks his own path to fortune and love and becomes a pioneer of Serbian printing.
NIN 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Death Mask”
Laslo Blašković · 46 when first published
Novel · 147 pages
AI-generated summary:A modern nomad who keeps leaving Novi Sad and returning to it tries to recognise and tell the most striking experiences of the modern world and of his own life, in episodes set in Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Italy and the United States.
NIN 2012 · Shortlist
Mira Otašević · 68 when first published
Novel · 105 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:Through the lives of women bound in different ways by photography, the twentieth century unfolds, from the illusory calm of Paris in the early 1930s through the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War to Vietnam, 1968 and Sarajevo in the 1990s.
NIN 2011 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Bernardi's Room”
Slobodan Tišma · 65 when first published
Novel · 135 pages
AI-generated summary:Pišta Petrović, a Novi Sad loner living in a flat he believes belongs to the designer Bernardi, abandons it to curl up in the wreck of a Mercedes left in a car park, where memories and daydreams carry him away.
NIN 2011 · Shortlist
Kontrolni punkt
David Albahari · 63 when first published
Novel · 208 pages · War, Satire
AI-generated summary:Soldiers manning a checkpoint in an unnamed war, set outside any specific time or place, are put to the test of humanity by bizarre, tragicomic and often morbid situations, without knowing who is attacking whom.
NIN 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Almaš Circles of Cured Sleepwalkers”
Franja Petrinović · 54 when first published
Novel · 309 pages
AI-generated summary:An unbalanced chronicle, now tender, now angry, of Novi Sad, a city that suddenly lurched and lost its balance for good, told through people who are gone and a time that has vanished.
NIN 2011 · Shortlist
Svetislav Basara · 58 when first published
Novel · 180 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:In a hospital room shared by several bedridden patients, a district informer, a writer and Aprcović, a philosopher of dark fate, trade memories that add up to a sardonic history of a nation inventing its own past and future.
NIN 2011 · Shortlist
Sasvim skromni darovi
Title translated by AI:“Quite Modest Gifts”
Uglješa Šajtinac · 40 when first published
Novel · 113 pages · Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:Two brothers, one in New York and one at home in the Banat, exchange emails about their American and Serbian everyday lives, their ageing parents and the family past that still shapes them.
NIN 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Ode to the Lesser Evil”
Voja Čolanović · 89 when first published
Novel · 311 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Janko and Mina, a Finnish woman, shared romantic and erotic days in Salzburg that shook or ended their marriages; now Mina arrives in Belgrade for a single day, and an astonishing amount happens in it.
NIN 2010 · Winner
Ono što oduvek želiš
Title translated by AI:“What You Have Always Wanted”
Gordana Ćirjanić · 53 when first published
Novel · 284 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:On the threshold of old age, Slobodan, a former producer of reality television back from the West, writes a long letter to his younger brother that settles his life's accounts, including a three-year affair with the brother's wife.
NIN 2010 · Shortlist
Ispod tavanice koja se ljuspa
Title translated by AI:“Under the Peeling Ceiling”
Goran Petrović · 49 when first published
Novella · 183 pages · Historical, Satire
AI-generated summary:In the Uranija cinema of a small Serbian town, a gallery of viewers watches a fateful screening interrupted by astonishing news, the death of Marshal Tito, beneath a ceiling painted as a sky that is starting to peel.
NIN 2010 · Shortlist
Gospođa Olga
Title translated by AI:“Madame Olga”
Radovan Beli Marković · 63 when first published
Novel · 289 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In Valjevo, in the last days of apparent peace before the Second World War, the narrator searches for the restless soul of a dead local eccentric, Madame Olga, in a game played between living people and ghosts.
NIN 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“We, the Different”
Veselin Marković · 47 when first published
Novel · 365 pages
AI-generated summary:Two parallel stories: a man marked since childhood by the death of a close cousin while skating on a frozen lake, and a woman set apart by a rare lack of pigment, each try to reconstruct the facts of their lives.
NIN 2010 · Shortlist
Vrlo malo svetlosti
Vladan Matijević · 48 when first published
Novel · 278 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Three stories follow people who were successful until yesterday and are now defeated: Hilary Hudson, an American art historian; Milutin Čabrinović, known as Anthracite, a former minister; and Đorđe Istina, a final-year philosophy student.
NIN 2010 · Shortlist
Kamen blizanac
Title translated by AI:“The Twin Stone”
Zoran Petrović · 56 when first published
Novel · 261 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:At the time of the First Serbian Uprising, a story of the uprising's actors between Niš and Istanbul opens onto side tales from Tsar Dušan's court, Hilandar, Hungary and Montenegro, all bound by the secret of the selam, a message and a gift.
NIN 2009 · Winner
Glasovi u vetru
Title translated by AI:“Voices in the Wind”
Grozdana Olujić · 75 when first published
Novel · 302 pages · Family, Historical, Migration
AI-generated summary:Danilo Aracki searches for his vanished brother and for the truth about his family, a Serbian middle-class clan whose fate, from the end of the nineteenth century through the twentieth, reaches across the Atlantic.
NIN 2009 · Shortlist
Konstantinovo raskršće
Dejan Stojiljković · 33 when first published
Novel · 265 pages · War, Speculative, Historical
AI-generated summary:In Niš in 1944, SS officer Heinrich Kahn closes in on a sword forged from one of the nails of the Cross, hidden beneath the ancient city, while a Chetnik major and the German commander stand in his way and a string of horrific murders shakes the town.
NIN 2009 · Shortlist
A ako umre pre nego što se probudi?
Title translated by AI:“What If He Dies Before He Wakes?”
Đorđe Pisarev · 52 when first published
Novel · 121 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:A man of a generation lost between worlds finds himself in a year where years no longer exist, in a Novi Sad whose vanished streets must be named anew and whose books are people mapping the city inside a Chinese shopping centre.
NIN 2009 · Shortlist
Mirjana Urošević · 67 when first published
Novel · 331 pages · Crime, Migration
AI-generated summary:Selena Kovač-Lekont, who left Serbia for Frankfurt as a girl with her mother, sets out to find a missing friend and stumbles on the story of Carmen Machado, a young Spanish woman murdered in a Frankfurt park, a crime she decides to solve.
NIN 2009 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Fingers of Mad Eyes”
Rajko Vasić · 57 when first published
Novel · 221 pages
NIN 2009 · Shortlist
Taoci
Title translated by AI:“Hostages”
Novel · 228 pages · Crime, Politics
AI-generated summary:Three years after watching her husband die on live television in a car bomb, the philosopher Sofija Atanasijević has not left her flat once, until a sniper who has just shot the economy minister from her roof bursts in.
NIN 2009 · Shortlist
Ljetopis vječnosti
Title translated by AI:“Chronicle of Eternity”
Žarko Komanin · 74 when first published
Novel · War, Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:In the hours before his death, Simon Rujanić looks back over his life and over the buried truth about his father, his brothers and the people of Pelinovo, the defeated side of the Second World War branded traitors by the victors.
NIN 2009 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Three Pictures of Victory”
Zvonko Karanović · 50 when first published
Novel · 310 pages · War, Satire
AI-generated summary:After serving as a reservist in Kosovo in 1999, Đorđe Uzelac, a thirty-year-old dandy and former seller of designer clothes, returns to Niš to start a new life and soon decides to leave the country.
NIN 2008 · Winner
Tesla, portret među maskama
Vladimir Pištalo · 48 when first published
Novel · 420 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:A lyrical novel of the life of Nikola Tesla, from his childhood in Lika to Budapest, Paris and New York, which is also a chronicle of the age that changed more in his lifetime than in all the centuries before.
NIN 2008 · Shortlist
Nevidljivi
Title translated by AI:“The Invisible Ones”
Aleksandar Gatalica · 44 when first published
Novel · 310 pages · Historical, Satire
AI-generated summary:From his sickbed, starting in 1953, Dr Dimitrije Gerasimović Gerasim writes thirty-three letters to a young friend in Chicago, revealing his part in the greatest artistic conspiracy of the century, the invention of modern art.
NIN 2008 · Shortlist
Moja poslednja glavobolja
Title translated by AI:“My Last Headache”
Laura Barna · 44 when first published
Novel · 165 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:On the threshold of death, the writer Isidora Sekulić gives her final confession, still haunted by the critic Jovan Skerlić's 1913 rebuke that her book spent seventeen pages on a headache in a year of so much Serbian bloodshed.
NIN 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Perfect Memory of Death”
Radoslav Petković · 55 when first published
Novel · 523 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Early in the fifteenth century a group of horsemen comes upon an ancient mausoleum that becomes the site of their mystical initiation, as Byzantium moves toward the fall of Constantinople.
NIN 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Diary of Marta Koen”
Svetislav Basara · 55 when first published
Novel · 281 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:In late-1980s Belgrade a certain Marta Koen dies, and the top of the party and state leadership turns up at her funeral; a reporter for the daily Borba tries to find out who she really was.
NIN 2008 · Shortlist
Top je bio vreo
Vladimir Kecmanović · 36 when first published
Novel · 186 pages · War
AI-generated summary:In besieged Sarajevo an eleven-year-old Serbian boy loses his parents to shelling and stops speaking, and Tidža, a Muslim neighbour, takes him into her care.
NIN 2008 · Shortlist
Хамам Балканија · Hamam Balkanija
Vladislav Bajac · 54 when first published
Novel · 362 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Chapters alternate between the sixteenth century of Mehmed Pasha Sokolović, the Serbian boy taken from his home who rose to grand vizier, and the architect Sinan, and our own time, where a writer named Vladislav Bajac meets Orhan Pamuk and other real people.
NIN 2007 · Winner
Ruski prozor
Dragan Velikić · 54 when first published
Novel · 358 pages
AI-generated summary:Daniel, an ageing conductor, tells the story of his life to a listener, Rudi Stupar, a young man from a small Vojvodina town and a would-be actor, whose own story then takes over the novel.
NIN 2007 · Shortlist
Novel · 211 pages
AI-generated summary:At the end of 1999, as the year rushes toward its change of digits, a novel in three chapters follows people in a city stripped of feeling, while the story of a Roman healer, Celsus, and a stolen scroll unfolds as a parable.
NIN 2007 · Shortlist
Poljubac
Title translated by AI:“The Kiss”
Gordana Ćirjanić · 50 when first published
Novel · 206 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Love becomes the fantasy of a lonely, wise man with a disability, whose final gesture radiates longing, in an intimate novel searching for the essentials that forever pass us by.
NIN 2007 · Shortlist
Vladimir Kecmanović · 35 when first published
Novel · 228 pages · Family, Crime
AI-generated summary:Simeon, an ageing Belgrade con man, gets an unexpected visit one night from the son he abandoned decades ago, and the two spend the only night of their lives together.
NIN 2006 · Winner
Uspon i pad Parkinsonove bolesti
Svetislav Basara · 53 when first published
Novel · 200 pages · Satire, Historical
AI-generated summary:Demyan Lavrentyevich Parkinson, inventor of a terrible disease, dies of exhaustion in a Kolyma camp in 1947 under a false name, having spent his life trying to change the world from the perspective of his strange illness.
NIN 2006 · Shortlist
Mirjana Mitrović · 45 when first published
Novel · 316 pages · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:Emilia Leta, wife of the ambitious Roman general Galerius, whose career rises toward the very top of Diocletian's empire, suddenly finds herself surplus to the needs of power when he sets her aside for a marriage of interest.
NIN 2006 · Shortlist
Komo
Srđan Valjarević · 39 when first published
Novel · 213 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A Belgrade writer who has never had money for travel goes abroad for a single month on a fellowship to Lake Como, at the foot of the Alps, and records his days there in a quiet, intimate chronicle.
NIN 2006 · Shortlist
Most
Zoran Živković · 58 when first published
Short stories · 123 pages
NIN 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Four Walls and a City”
Zvonko Karanović · 47 when first published
Novel · 190 pages · War, Love
AI-generated summary:Vladan Mitić, known as Tatula, a war invalid and small-time dealer who once studied art in Amsterdam, tries to win the girl he is obsessed with in Niš during the 1999 bombing.
NIN 2005 · Winner
Semolj zemlja
Title translated by AI:“Semolj Land”
Miro Vuksanović · 61 when first published
Novel · 467 pages
AI-generated summary:A sequel to Semolj Mountain, this alphabetical novel is built from 909 names of mountain places, a collage of words and landscapes that preserves a vanishing mythic world in language rather than in plot.
NIN 2005 · Shortlist
Pijavice
David Albahari · 57 when first published
Novel · 309 pages · Politics, Speculative
AI-generated summary:A young newspaper columnist witnesses a strange scene on the Zemun riverbank and starts his own investigation, which leads him to a mysterious young Jewish woman and a manuscript of kabbalistic texts.
NIN 2005 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Absinthe”
Goran Milašinović · 47 when first published
Novel · 157 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:Two men named Mihajlo Alić, utterly unlike each other, share only a fondness for absinthe and an unlucky fate, as their lives cross the First World War and twentieth-century Central Europe.
NIN 2005 · Shortlist
Utočište
Title translated by AI:“Refuge”
Milica Mićić Dimovska · 58 when first published
Novel · 136 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A Novi Sad woman approaching middle age, trapped between a cold husband, a mother who despises her and a sick child, glimpses a possible escape in a casual connection with a stranger.
NIN 2005 · Shortlist
Mirjana Novaković · 39 when first published
Novel · 524 pages · Speculative, Politics
AI-generated summary:In a Belgrade that looks like the city at the turn of the millennium yet is subtly wrong, with no New Belgrade, no recent history and chocolate sold only by dealers, people who find their world unbearable set out to replace it with a perfect one.
NIN 2005 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Who Is Crying”
Sanja Domazet · 37 when first published
Novel · 155 pages
NIN 2005 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Berlin Window”
Saša Ilić · 33 when first published
Novel · 304 pages · Politics, Migration
AI-generated summary:Sent to Berlin by a non-governmental organisation to record the stories of people who fled the Balkan wars, the narrator instead hears the life of his landlord, Viktor Greber, an elderly East Berliner, and of the artist Iza Fermeren.
NIN 2004 · Winner
Kiša i hartija
Title translated by AI:“Rain and Paper”
Vladimir Tasić · 39 when first published
Novel · 267 pages · Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:Tanja, a Novi Sad woman who has drifted around the world, is pulled back to her home city by family duties and tries to find out whether there is still a home for her there, among a circle of new, oddly post-apocalyptic friends.
NIN 2004 · Shortlist
Orkestar na pedale
Title translated by AI:“The Pedal Orchestra”
Radovan Beli Marković · 57 when first published
Novel · 334 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Doctor Subota, director of the Valjevo lunatic asylum, tells the bitter story of how he came to Serbia and drifted from battlefields to the madhouse, while he searches for a lost pedal orchestra.
NIN 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Heart of the Earth”
Svetislav Basara · 51 when first published
Novel · 268 pages · Satire, Historical
AI-generated summary:Friedrich Nietzsche, who never set foot on Cyprus, spends invented 'Cypriot days' there trying to build a hot-air balloon, while Freud advises Atatürk, Wagner builds his theatre at Bayreuth and Stalin and Lou Salomé fall under the philosopher's spell.
NIN 2003 · Winner
Pisac izdaleka
Title translated by AI:“A Writer from Afar”
Vladan Matijević · 41 when first published
Novel · Satire, War
AI-generated summary:During the 1999 bombing, while dodging mobilisation, the Serbian writer Džoni Glintić sets out to write a novel that will win him a prestigious literary prize awarded by the Serbian Sugar Factory.
NIN 2003 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Epoch Croaked Yesterday”
Ana Vučković · 19 when first published
Novel · 203 pages
NIN 2003 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Domaszewski File”
Dragan Velikić · 50 when first published
Novel · 199 pages
AI-generated summary:The narrator becomes absorbed in Viktor von Domaszewski, a forgotten architect who might have built the harbour of Pula but was sidelined to a single warehouse, and in his imagination makes him the true creator of the port.
NIN 2003 · Shortlist
Kuća u Puertu
Title translated by AI:“The House in Puerto”
Gordana Ćirjanić · 46 when first published
Novel · 467 pages · Family, Love, Historical
AI-generated summary:In a house in Spain, objects, manuscripts and photographs bring up the stories of people from Portugal, Italy, Herzegovina, Madrid and Belgrade, joining the history of Spain and Serbia across a century.
NIN 2003 · Shortlist
Devet belih oblaka
Title translated by AI:“Nine White Clouds”
Radovan Beli Marković · 56 when first published
Novel · 289 pages
NIN 2002 · Winner
Ukop oca
Title translated by AI:“The Father's Burial”
Mladen Markov · 68 when first published
Novel · 337 pages · Family, War
AI-generated summary:Andreja Kereba, an ageing Belgrade painter and restorer once disinherited by his father, travels to a small town in the central Banat for the old man's funeral, which keeps being postponed.
NIN 2002 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Logic of the River, the Railway and the Scrapyard”
Novel · 143 pages · Coming of age, Speculative
AI-generated summary:Three heroes, like three good spirits of the city, move through a fantastic, dreamlike Belgrade woven from an alternative history of its pavements, parks, facades, little workshops, squares and monuments.
NIN 2002 · Shortlist
Sablja grofa Vronskog
Title translated by AI:“Count Vronsky's Sabre”
Dobrilo Nenadić · 62 when first published
Novel · 498 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:Jevrem Vesić, known as Ješa Mušica, a sharp-penned journalist and author of cheap serial novels, short but highly educated, follows the Serbian-Turkish war of 1876 from the moment the Russian volunteers arrive.
NIN 2002 · Shortlist
Knez Miškin u Belom Valjevu
Title translated by AI:“Prince Myshkin in White Valjevo”
Radovan Beli Marković · 55 when first published
Novel · 403 pages
NIN 2001 · Winner
Zoran Ćirić · 39 when first published
Novel · 255 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Hobo, a club DJ in Nišvil, the author's mythologised version of the southern Serbian city of Niš, narrates his way through a local underworld of blackmail, pimping, feuds and killings.
NIN 2001 · Shortlist
Jesenja svila
Title translated by AI:“Autumn Silk”
Danilo Nikolić · 75 when first published
Novel · 158 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:One late summer a man withdraws far from the world in search of solitude, until a woman appears and a love begins between two people weighed down by everything they have lost.
NIN 2001 · Shortlist
Svetski putnik
David Albahari · 53 when first published
Novel · 216 pages · Migration, Politics
AI-generated summary:A Canadian narrator watches two men from the former Yugoslavia, Daniel Atijas, who fascinates him, and a man from the other side of the war, from Croatia, and through them faces how little anyone can grasp of the Balkans.
NIN 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“In the Shadow of the Dragon”
Đorđe Pisarev · 44 when first published
Novel · 111 pages · War, Speculative
AI-generated summary:In 2020 two friends at a bar meet a stranger who hands them the manuscript of Ana V., a Novi Sad woman who bought a crumbling house in the Fruška Gora village of Vizić and found there letters and diaries written during the 1999 bombing.
NIN 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Bremen Case”
Dragan Velikić · 48 when first published
Novel · 220 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:Ivan Bazarov builds his life out of other people's stories, those of his stepfather, his mother, his grandfather, his lover Olivera and the father who vanished in a camp near Bremen, as his family is driven through the storms of the twentieth century.
NIN 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Sarajevo Megillah”
Eliezer Papo · 32 when first published
Novel · 237 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:A historical novel set in Ottoman Bosnia that moves between the official language of power, its decrees and lists, and the fragile voices of ordinary people, around an injustice done by the authorities and the stories told against it.
NIN 2001 · Shortlist
Novel · 269 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:On the eve of and during the upheavals of 1848, Branko Grujić, an unlucky bridegroom, tries to come to terms with a humiliating youthful failure while the centuries-old relations between Serbs and Hungarians turn violent.
NIN 2001 · Shortlist
Poslednja ruža Kolubare
Title translated by AI:“The Last Rose of the Kolubara”
Radovan Beli Marković · 54 when first published
Novel · 232 pages
AI-generated summary:Written as the history of the Valjevo lunatic asylum, the closing part of the author's Kolubara trilogy mixes the lyrical and the grotesque, the realistic and the fantastic, in a catalogue of unusual images and details.
NIN 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Surfacing”
Veselin Marković · 38 when first published
Novel · 359 pages
AI-generated summary:A gentle, mild-mannered man tries to reconstruct his own buried memories to solve the great secret of his life, a search that leads through childhood, trauma, illness real and imagined, hypnosis and the idea of reincarnation.
NIN 2001 · Shortlist
Опроштајни дар · Oproštajni dar
Vladimir Tasić · 36 when first published
Novel · 152 pages · Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:After his beloved, eccentric brother disappears in 1990s Novi Sad, the narrator emigrates to Canada, where a parcel arriving at his new address forces him to face the truth about the disappearance.
NIN 2000 · Winner
Ситничарница „Код срећне руке“ · Sitničarnica „Kod srećne ruke“
Goran Petrović · 39 when first published
Novel · 327 pages · Love, Historical
AI-generated summary:Adam Lozanić, a poor student who proofreads for a tourist magazine, is hired to correct My Legacy, a strange 1936 novel by Anastas Branica that has no characters or events and was written as a meeting place for its author and the woman he loves.
NIN 2000 · Shortlist
Страх и његов слуга · Strah i njegov sluga
Mirjana Novaković · 34 when first published
Novel · 267 pages · Historical, Speculative
AI-generated summary:Early in the eighteenth century a so-called Count von Hausburg arrives in Austrian-ruled Belgrade, seduces a princess, spies on her husband the regent and quietly looks into the vampires reported around the town. The count is in fact the devil.
NIN 2000 · Shortlist
Semolj gora
Title translated by AI:“Semolj Mountain”
Miro Vuksanović · 56 when first published
Novel · 501 pages
AI-generated summary:A novel told in 878 short pieces arranged in alphabetical order, each built around a rare or forgotten word, which together sketch the life of a mountain homeland that is at once real and mythical.
NIN 2000 · Shortlist
Limunacija u Ćelijama
Title translated by AI:“Illumination in Ćelije”
Radovan Beli Marković · 53 when first published
Novel
AI-generated summary:Taking a story by the nineteenth-century writer Stevan Sremac as its starting point, a modern tale unfolds in the Kolubara village of Ćelije, where the characters come from this world and from the next.
NIN 2000 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Chub on a Willow Switch”
Novel · 235 pages
NIN 2000 · Shortlist
Kratkodnevica
Title translated by AI:“The Short Days”
Svetislav Basara · 47 when first published
Novel · 135 pages
NIN 2000 · Shortlist
Milenijum u Beogradu
Vladimir Pištalo · 40 when first published
Novel · 228 pages · Love, War
AI-generated summary:Five friends who grew up in a dreamlike, half-mythical Belgrade try to hold on to their friendship and their loves as the war that begins in 1991 and the city's long decline tear at their lives.