All prizes Slovenia
nagrada kresnik
Slovenia · Since 1991 · For books in Slovenian
Awarded each June by the Ljubljana daily Delo to the best novel in Slovene published in the previous year; the prize is named for the year it is given (the Kresnik 2009 went to a novel published in 2008). The jury names five finalists before choosing the winner.
The Kresnik was founded in 1991 and is presented by the newspaper Delo, which gave it its full name, Delova nagrada kresnik. Its first winner was Lojze Kovačič's Kristalni čas. A jury of critics, in most years five, reads the previous year's Slovene novels, often more than a hundred; since 2003 it first names a top ten in spring, then five finalists. The winner is announced around Midsummer Eve, 23 June, and lights a midsummer bonfire, a kres, from which the prize takes its name; the ceremony has been held on Rožnik hill above Ljubljana since the late 1990s. It is regarded as the main Slovene award for the novel.
Kresnik 2026 · Shortlist
Agata Tomažič · 48 when first published
Novel · 220 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:When Vladimir Baumgarten, a dying retired heart surgeon who is said to have operated on Tito, reports a stolen ladder, the investigator Robert Obrh becomes the willing listener to his memories and morally dubious views.
Kresnik 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Where the Tulips Dance”
Irena Svetek · 50 when first published
Novel · 469 pages · Family, Historical, War
AI-generated summary:Beginning in 1912 in Vršac, on the border between Serbia and Romania, a grandmother, her daughter and her granddaughter each face the upheavals of two world wars and of Yugoslavia between and after them.
Kresnik 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Tobacconist”
Roman Rozina · 65 when first published
Novel · 251 pages
AI-generated summary:From behind the small window of his newspaper kiosk, a very particular man who finds safety there from the outside world comes to know in detail the people who pass by, their joys and their sorrows.
Kresnik 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Face”
Vesna Lemaić · 44 when first published
Novel · 312 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:Squatters living in a former factory need money to fix their leaking roof, so they turn one room into a haunted Tito Room for tourists, but a real supernatural force begins to affect their minds.
Kresnik 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Finger in the Ventricle”
Anja Radaljac · 34 when first published
Novel · 411 pages · Politics, Nature
AI-generated summary:Višnja flees her life with Erjon, an activist with whom she spent three years filming society's dark side, kept going by the wish to help stop the killing machine she came to know and by worry for her friend Frida.
Kresnik 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Chicken Physics”
Feri Lainšček · 65 when first published
Novel · 239 pages · Autofiction, Coming of age, Family · Kurji pastir, book 3
AI-generated summary:Growing up in Dolenci in Prekmurje, young Fêrek puzzles over truths that can be one thing and another at once, while his parents struggle to build a house and he falls in love for the first time.
Kresnik 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Polluter”
Kazimir Kolar · 45 when first published
Novel · 154 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Strange things are happening in Ljubljana: huge puddles of urine appear in public places, monuments are smeared with excrement, and young women begin to die in a tower block, and a journalist keeps coming across one name, Theodor Baumann.
Kresnik 2025 · Shortlist
Tina Perić · 39 when first published
Novel · 170 pages · Politics, Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:Through the childhood, youth and adulthood of Mia, the novel follows the Batić family, never quite equal in Slovenia because the father comes from "down south", as one missing stroke on a letter of their surname shows.
Kresnik 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Of Wine, Goats and Other Deceptions”
Boris Kolar · 63 when first published
Novel · 204 pages · Historical, Satire
AI-generated summary:In the early fourteenth century, old Aicelina, condemned to drowning by the good Bishop Yves, curses his wine in revenge, and the finest wine in Christendom can be saved only by the cheese of a very special white goat.
Kresnik 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Three Colours for One Death”
Novel · 338 pages
AI-generated summary:Tobijas, one of only twelve people in the world who can see all colours, falls in love with Livija, who is translating The Blue Revolution by the French artist Yves Klein.
Kresnik 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Heavy Water”
Pia Prezelj · 28 when first published
Novel · 115 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Ida, a childless widow whom her village calls useless, shuts herself in her house after her husband's death, mourning less for him than for the life she might have lived, until her neighbour Marta comes to check on her.
Kresnik 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Grail”
Vlado Žabot · 65 when first published
Novel · 357 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:Soldiers lost after the last battle of the First World War are stranded in a swamp, where the Roma they hold captive promise to show them the way out if they first pan enough gold from the river Angelika.
Kresnik 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Why I Don't Write”
Dijana Matković · 37 when first published
Novel · 254 pages · Autofiction, Migration, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A writer from a family of Bosnian immigrants who knew unemployment, poverty and rejection by the Slovenian majority during the transition years looks back at how her parents, and she herself, were shaped.
Kresnik 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Woman with the Silver Eye”
Katarina Marinčič · 54 when first published
Novel · 151 pages
AI-generated summary:On a cycling trip, the writer Emil stops for the night in a small place on a mountain pass, and on a walk in the forest meets a strange woman with a silver eye, just before a violent storm.
Kresnik 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Mother's Booklet”
Katja Gorečan · 33 when first published
Novel · 141 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:An unborn child named Tobija tells the story of his mother, a young woman who loses him in the ninth week of pregnancy after the death of her beloved grandmother, while hereditary hearing loss threatens her with deafness.
Kresnik 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“On the Slope”
Tina Vrščaj · 35 when first published
Novel · 254 pages · Family, Nature
AI-generated summary:Gregor, ambitious and enthralled by technology, and Eva, an unemployed biologist who teaches their two small daughters to love nature, live in a remote hillside hamlet called Klanec, where their marriage slowly cools.
Kresnik 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Happy Days”
Andrej E. Skubic · 54 when first published
Novel · 437 pages · Family, Crime
AI-generated summary:The quiet retirement of Dušan, a widower living in an old people's home, is broken when detectives come asking about his daughter Leja, a successful dramaturge at a city theatre, who cannot be reached.
Kresnik 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Trigger”
Davorin Lenko · 37 when first published
Novel · 295 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Aleksandra, an escapist reader whose taste for crime fiction and horror has made her fascinated by serial killers, drifts between lovers and becomes an expert on an online manifesto written by a double murderer.
Kresnik 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Star Chart”
Dušan Šarotar · 53 when first published
Novel · 166 pages · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:Through the memories of their maid Žalna, the novel follows Franjo Schwarz, a Jewish merchant from Čakovec, his wife Rozika and their son Evgen, who from 1932 make a life by the railway station in Šalovci in Prekmurje.
Kresnik 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Heir”
Marjan Žiberna · 53 when first published
Novel · 275 pages · War
AI-generated summary:A jaded psychotherapist, tired of clients who come only because they can afford him, is visited at last by someone who truly needs help: Stane Lavtižar, a rich man whose inheritance has come at a painful price.
Kresnik 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Hen Herder”
Feri Lainšček · 61 when first published
Novel · 297 pages · Autofiction, Family, Coming of age · Kurji pastir, book 1
AI-generated summary:In 1959, in Dolenci in the Goričko hills near the Hungarian border, Trejzka gives birth late in life to a second child, a boy later named Feri, while her husband Pištek is away working on the roads.
Kresnik 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Shards”
Gašper Kralj · 46 when first published
Novel · 249 pages · Love, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A precarious Slovenian translator and would-be writer meets Klara, a Catalan architect with a prison past who works as an occasional tour guide, and their encounters across Barcelona, Prague, Vienna and Ljubljana set a book in motion.
Kresnik 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Storyteller”
Mirana Likar · 59 when first published
Novel · 284 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:In his ninety-second year, Nikolaj Šturm offers a deal to a waitress from a nearby café: she will escape a humiliating job through marriage, he will not die alone, and he will tell her his extraordinary life story.
Kresnik 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“At the Other End of the World”
Novel · 188 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Vinc Hardt, a lonely painter swept far from his Carinthian home to a remote harbour town, watches everything around him shrink and vanish, his mother tongue above all, until three famous stolen paintings may turn out to be his.
Kresnik 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Sun of Poetovio”
Branko Cestnik · 54 when first published
Novel · 512 pages · Historical, Migration
AI-generated summary:Between 163 and 195, a black slave, a Roman legionary and a merchant fleeing the plague each end up in Poetovio, today's Ptuj, a flourishing colony on the Drava where many peoples and faiths meet.
Kresnik 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Original”
Jiři Kočica · 53 when first published
Novel · 249 pages
AI-generated summary:Just before his death, Janez Bolčina, a Slovenian emigrant once close to the Philadelphia circle of Richard Mutt, tells a young art historian in Ljubljana the truth about the Fountain, the urinal later credited to Marcel Duchamp.
Kresnik 2020 · Shortlist
V Elvisovi sobi
Sebastijan Pregelj · 49 when first published
Novel · 368 pages · Coming of age, War
AI-generated summary:Jan, an only child, grows up in multicultural Ljubljana in the last decades of Yugoslavia, and much of his life happens in the bedroom of his classmate Elvis, where he meets another culture and lives through many turning points.
Kresnik 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Madhouse at the Top of the Hill”
Suzana Tratnik · 56 when first published
Novel · 213 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Taking a break from life in Ljubljana, Ariana Firsen is forced back to the backwater of Privežice, where she lives with her spiteful aunt, drinks with the locals and visits her grandmother in the madhouse on the hill.
Kresnik 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Nameless”
Jani Virk · 56 when first published
Novel · 195 pages · Coming of age, Family
AI-generated summary:A sensitive teenager whose happy childhood ends with his parents' divorce moves with his mother from a house with a garden to a bleak housing estate, while his father leaves for the coast with a young lover.
Kresnik 2019 · Shortlist
Mirt Komel · 38 when first published
Novel · 350 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Journalist Erik Tlomm retreats to his wife's grandparents' empty house in Medsočje, an imaginary village on the Soča, where on a stormy night the mayor's young daughter is murdered and hung from the linden on the square.
Kresnik 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Contract”
Mojca Širok · 50 when first published
Novel · 341 pages · Crime, Politics
AI-generated summary:In a single day in Rome, a top lawyer and a respected surgeon are murdered and a great Mafia boss commits suicide, and Commissioner Emanuele Rubino of the anti-Mafia squad and investigative journalist Flaminia set out to find the links.
Kresnik 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Light, the Most Beautiful Stranger”
Vladimir P. Štefanec · 54 when first published
Novel · 285 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:Filip, the last living member of a once famous family of photographers, still photographs the dead as he always has, while longing to step out of that grim duty into the light.
Kresnik 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Gravel”
Florjan Lipuš · 80 when first published
Novel · 88 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:A group of Carinthian Slovenes returns from a memorial visit to the women's concentration camp where many women of their minority died, setting off a reckoning with their community's forgetting.
Kresnik 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Old Man and I”
Novel · 203 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:An aimless young man in his early twenties meets an old music teacher who agrees, on strict terms of daily discipline, to teach him the piano, music and life, until he is ready for the academy entrance exam.
Kresnik 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“All My Americas”
Štefan Kardoš · 51 when first published
Novel · 311 pages · Family, Migration, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:Twenty years after his grandfather's death, a writer sets out to keep a childhood promise to write a novel about him: Šandor the American, born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who lived there again after the First World War.
Kresnik 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Holy Battle”
Vlado Žabot · 59 when first published
Novel · 315 pages · War
AI-generated summary:On his mentor's instructions, history doctoral student Radovan Podolni travels to a former war zone to study its archives and border fortresses, but the clear task of finding the objective truth about the past grows ever murkier and more dangerous.
Kresnik 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Expiry Date”
Gašper Kralj · 42 when first published
Novel · 213 pages
AI-generated summary:A professional carer for the dying, meticulous about order and hygiene in his work, finds his mind filling with doubts and suspicions that spread to his on-and-off partner Katarina and his drinking companions.
Kresnik 2017 · Shortlist
Kronosova žetev
Mojca Kumerdej · 52 when first published
Novel · 380 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:At the end of the sixteenth century, in the Inner Austrian lands of today's Slovenia, Prince-Bishop Wolfgang arrives to drive out Protestants and impure spirits and bring the people back to the true faith.
Kresnik 2017 · Shortlist
Jezero
Tadej Golob · 49 when first published
Novel · 400 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:On New Year's Eve a woman walking her dog finds a headless body in the Jezernica stream at Lake Bohinj, and Taras Birsa, a senior Ljubljana crime inspector nearing fifty, is drawn into the case almost by accident.
Kresnik 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Paper, Rock, Scissors”
Tomo Podstenšek · 35 when first published
Novel · 211 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Simon, a solitary geography teacher in his mid-forties who has avoided conflict all his life, seeks comfort in memories of his school days with two friends, until an invitation to a reunion thirty years later takes him home.
Kresnik 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Intimate”
Gabriela Babnik · 36 when first published
Novel · 397 pages · Love, Migration
AI-generated summary:Between Paris, Ljubljana and New York, three stories unfold: the love of Janina and Fadul, a journalist who fled Chad; young Amina and much older Tibor after the death of their small daughter; and Deana, a photographer of bodies.
Kresnik 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Pianist's Touch”
Mirt Komel · 35 when first published
Novel · 186 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Gabrijel Goldman, a pianist who followed his inner voice into music against his father's wishes, recalls his past while recovering in a New York hospital, tormented by a fear of being touched.
Kresnik 2016 · Shortlist
Nataša Sukič · 53 when first published
Novel · 142 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A writer obsessed with her lover Ana, another artist, recalls how the two built a life together in a small wooden house in an unspoiled corner of Croatian Istria, until frightening noises begin to break into their nights.
Kresnik 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Wind and Echo”
Štefan Kardoš · 49 when first published
Novel · 191 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Adam Teodor Vogrinski, once an acclaimed musician whose life fell apart after his wife's suicide, takes a job as a music teacher in a village school ruled by its headmaster, who is also the mayor.
Kresnik 2015 · Shortlist
Panorama
Dušan Šarotar · 46 when first published
Novel · 206 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:A writer, perhaps the author's alter ego, looks for peace and inspiration on a slow journey along the rainy, misty coast of Ireland, then travels on to Belgium and through Ljubljana to Sarajevo.
Kresnik 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“In Their Words”
Katarina Marinčič · 46 when first published
Novel · 429 pages
AI-generated summary:A writer named Pavel struggles to build a novel out of the autobiographies of three men: Heinrich Schliemann, the merchant who found Troy; Karl May, the adventure novelist; and P., a spy chief in an unnamed Communist state.
Kresnik 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Short Novel about Snow and Love”
Marko Sosič · 56 when first published
Novel · 204 pages · Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:Alma and Olga, two Slovenian women from Trieste who have not met in twenty years, begin to miss each other; Alma, married and living in Asiago, watches her son grow into a neo-Nazi who scorns her and her language.
Kresnik 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Stone Seed”
Veronika Simoniti · 47 when first published
Novel · 234 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Paloma, now a grown woman, returns to her family's summer house on an imaginary Croatian island and writes down her memories of one summer, which began when a local woman threw a stone into a crowd of foreigners at a party.
Kresnik 2014 · Shortlist
Začarani Odisej
Evald Flisar · 68 when first published
Novel · 216 pages
AI-generated summary:A fifty-five-year-old man who lost his memory after a surfing accident in Bali travels the world under five false names, carrying out tasks for a mysterious employer and writing emails in the hope of learning who he is.
Kresnik 2014 · Shortlist
Na/pol
Jasmin B. Frelih · 27 when first published
Novel · 368 pages
AI-generated summary:In the near future, three lives unfold apart: Evan, a theatre director in Japan who would rather take drugs than stage his last great production; Kras Volk, a minister of war near fifty; and Zoja, a poet in New York.
Kresnik 2014 · Shortlist
Jurij Hudolin · 40 when first published
Novel · 187 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Ingrid Rosenfeld, a beautiful young teacher of Slovene who lives for books, ignores men until her late twenties and then finds herself drawn into relationships with older, violent men.
Kresnik 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Sediments”
Tone Peršak · 66 when first published
Novel · 379 pages · Autofiction, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In an autobiographical account, a boy named Tone grows up in poverty in the Styrian countryside after the Second World War, amid constant moves and beatings, thinking about the world unusually early.
Kresnik 2013 · Shortlist
Borut Golob · 39 when first published
Novel · 198 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A man of Generation X takes apart, hour by hour, a single day which, he warns at the outset, ended in his final break-up with the woman he loves.
Kresnik 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“You Who Come from Afar into My Nearness”
Marko Sosič · 54 when first published
Novel · 345 pages
AI-generated summary:Ivan Slokar, a Slovenian natural sciences teacher in Trieste, seems to have everything for a fulfilled life, until a dark stain from his past begins to spread over his present during a few days in April 2006.
Kresnik 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Me, Scared?”
Maruša Krese · 65 when first published
Novel · 201 pages · War, Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:Two young Partisans hiding in the Slovenian forests during the Second World War fall in love amid hunger, cold and death; after the war they marry, start a family and join the Communist elite building the new Yugoslavia.
Kresnik 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“West Pit”
Peter Rezman · 56 when first published
Novel · 281 pages
AI-generated summary:Ivan, an ageing coal miner haunted by the underground accident that killed his best friend Lojze, is visited one day by Lojze's son Denis, who never knew his father and wants to know why he died.
Kresnik 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“On Bearability”
Aleš Čar · 40 when first published
Novel · 257 pages · Family, Historical, War
AI-generated summary:A family chronicle across three generations of the 20th century, centred on a patriarch who serves in four different armies and, when the killing ends, faces the troubles and loves of family life with his five daughters.
Kresnik 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Travellers”
Cvetka Bevc · 51 when first published
Novel · 159 pages · Historical, Family, War
AI-generated summary:Three parallel stories of restless travellers: a grandfather in Prekmurje during the Second World War, his grandson, a photographer, at the end of the 1980s, and the apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew.
Kresnik 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“On Thursday at Six”
Lucija Stepančič · 42 when first published
Novel · 191 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:In Ljubljana in 1998 a failed economics student, still in love with the man who left her, starts an affair with his colleague out of boredom and revenge, unaware that he is HIV-positive.
Kresnik 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“At Noon the Boots Will Dance”
Zdenko Kodrič · 62 when first published
Novel · 249 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:In January 1943 two thousand Nazi soldiers surround the Pohorje Battalion of Slovene partisans in a remote, marshy forest in the Pohorje hills, in the battle that becomes a symbol of Slovene resistance in Styria.
Kresnik 2011 · Shortlist
Na zlati obali
Evald Flisar · 65 when first published
Novel · 210 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:Five years after a travel writer vanished, leaving his wife and son, the son learns that his father is exploring Africa again and sets off to find him, while two couples follow the route of the father's book.
Kresnik 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Man Who Rode the Tiger”
Sebastijan Pregelj · 40 when first published
Novel · 219 pages · Speculative, Satire
AI-generated summary:A model citizen, half Georgian and half Russian, becomes a cosmonaut and is sent to a space station far above the Earth, where after two years alone he loses contact with the home planet.
Kresnik 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Slope of the Sunny Hill”
Štefan Kardoš · 44 when first published
Novel · 195 pages
AI-generated summary:A loner from a remote village, given a landscape painting by his colleagues after twenty years with his firm, is carried by it into memories of three women who marked his life.
Kresnik 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Perfect Day for an Assassination”
Vladimir P. Štefanec · 46 when first published
Novel · 231 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:A man who has decided the president would be the best person to kill, the security agent who might stop him, a reporter, a father and a small child left alone in a flat converge on the day of a planned assassination.
Kresnik 2010 · Shortlist
Andrej E. Skubic · 42 when first published
Novel · 273 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Two very different women, both outsiders secretly akin to a woman once acquitted of witchcraft, are driven by hostile circumstances to bloody acts, while an anonymous online crowd watches and comments.
Kresnik 2010 · Shortlist
Opazovalec
Evald Flisar · 64 when first published
Novel · 279 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:A young amateur playwright from Ljubljana who lives more in his imagination than in the world learns he has a year to live, and with the help of a strange beggar sets off for New York and a perilous adventure.
Kresnik 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Love in the Air”
Jani Virk · 47 when first published
Novel · 185 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A divorced music-school teacher in his forties, left by his wife for another man, raises his eight-year-old daughter alone in Ljubljana and drifts between several women in search of love.
Kresnik 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Mature Things”
Lojze Kovačič · 81 when first published
Novel · 479 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:An old writer living in a tower block in Ljubljana keeps a diary over his last decade, settling accounts with life, writing, love and family, and with Slovenes and Slovene identity.
Kresnik 2009 · Shortlist
Spremeni me
Andrej Blatnik · 45 when first published
Novel · 185 pages · Speculative, Satire
AI-generated summary:In a near-future consumer society of isolated social classes, an advertising executive who helped shape this world realises its foundations are false, leaves his family and career, and sets off into the unknown.
Kresnik 2009 · Shortlist
Iqball hotel
Boris Kolar · 48 when first published
Novel · 150 pages · Satire, Historical
AI-generated summary:After the First World War an easy-going young Mediterranean man builds a mud-brick hotel in the middle of the African savannah, whose only guests are herders fond of betting, drink and brawling.
Kresnik 2009 · Shortlist
Drevo brez imena
Drago Jančar · 60 when first published
Novel · 274 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:An archivist in Ljubljana comes across the memoirs of a wartime serial seducer and of a psychiatric nurse, and his growing obsession with them draws him into the dark past of the Second World War and of his own childhood.
Kresnik 2009 · Shortlist
Sebastijan Pregelj · 38 when first published
Novel · 239 pages · Speculative, Historical
AI-generated summary:Police special forces surround two flats in Ljubljana's skyscraper to eliminate a charismatic Muslim prophet and his international guards, but the sniper chosen for the job finds the woman he loves among the targets.
Kresnik 2008 · Shortlist
Biljard v Dobrayu
Dušan Šarotar · 39 when first published
Novel · 247 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:In the once-grand Hotel Dobray in Murska Sobota, with its casino and brothel, many lives collide on a single night at the end of the Second World War, as the Red Army approaches and a last game of billiards is played.
Kresnik 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Untouchables”
Feri Lainšček · 48 when first published
Novel · 178 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:A would-be Roma king tells the story of four generations of his family, from a grandfather who escaped a Nazi camp to Tito's Yugoslavia, framed by the legend of the nail that drives the Roma to wander.
Kresnik 2008 · Shortlist
Nebesa v robidah
Nataša Kramberger · 24 when first published
Novel · 272 pages
AI-generated summary:A young woman's memories move like a kaleidoscope between a market and a babysitting job in Amsterdam and a childhood in the Styrian countryside, while in a second part a family from the Slovene coast tells its own side.
Kresnik 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Third World”
Suzana Tratnik · 44 when first published
Novel · 234 pages
Kresnik 2007 · Shortlist
Andrej E. Skubic · 39 when first published
Novel · 236 pages
AI-generated summary:In Ljubljana in 2006 a single, thirty-nine-year-old history graduate stuck in a dull job at a travel agency dreams up a city tour of sites of public executions and becomes fascinated by a beautiful new neighbour.
Kresnik 2007 · Shortlist
Nejc Gazvoda · 21 when first published
Novel · 217 pages
AI-generated summary:A bored student in Ljubljana who lives for television and nostalgic memories of childhood learns that his childhood best friend, believed to have killed himself years ago, is alive and leading a strange cult.
Kresnik 2007 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Insomnia”
Vinko Möderndorfer · 48 when first published
Novel · 181 pages
Kresnik 2007 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Republic of Morning Dew”
Vladimir P. Štefanec · 42 when first published
Novel · 207 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:In Murska Sobota around the First World War a respected Jewish lawyer causes a fatal road accident with his prestigious new car, and though not to blame, he is cast out of the bourgeois society he belonged to.
Kresnik 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Jelovšek's Women”
Marko Hudnik · 74 when first published
Novel · 371 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:An ageing widower who lived for forty years in the shadow of his dominant wife is surprised, in the depths of mourning, by a new love, while letters from his late wife start appearing on his computer.
Kresnik 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Tito, My Love”
Marko Sosič · 47 when first published
Novel · 187 pages · Coming of age, Family
AI-generated summary:A Slovene boy growing up near Trieste in the 1960s, who struggles to spell Italian at school, listens to his relatives' dark wartime stories and dreams of one day meeting Marshal Tito with his mother.
Kresnik 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Loves of Bluebeard”
Vinko Möderndorfer · 47 when first published
Novel · 226 pages · Crime, Love
AI-generated summary:A charming, wealthy computer programmer who keeps a private black notebook about each of his lovers lands in police custody when it emerges that four of his former girlfriends have vanished without trace.
Kresnik 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Future That Never Was”
Vladimir Kavčič · 73 when first published
Novel · 982 pages · Politics, Historical
AI-generated summary:In Ljubljana after the Second World War, the intimate stories of a circle of bourgeois friends and acquaintances unfold against the building of socialism, from the post-war years into the 1970s.
Kresnik 2005 · Shortlist
Čaj s kraljico
Evald Flisar · 59 when first published
Novel · 451 pages · Satire, Migration
AI-generated summary:In 1969 a young Slovene painter with enormous ambitions sets off for London to win fame and fortune, and from the border onwards runs into one comic misunderstanding after another.
Kresnik 2005 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Arrhythmia”
Jani Virk · 42 when first published
Novel · 150 pages
AI-generated summary:A successful, fit advertising boss in his forties, married for fifteen years and with lovers on the side, begins to suffer anxiety and heart trouble that crack his perfect world.
Kresnik 2005 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Years of Grace”
Sebastijan Pregelj · 34 when first published
Novel · 231 pages · Speculative, Historical, Crime
AI-generated summary:A retired cleaner finds tiny fingers broken off an angel statue in a church, and they turn out to be real children's fingers, setting off an investigation that reaches back to angels on Earth in the 18th century.
Kresnik 2005 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Tall Stranger”
Željko Kozinc · 65 when first published
Novel · 238 pages · Crime, Migration
AI-generated summary:An Argentine biologist and wildlife filmmaker gets a mysterious call that his mother in Slovenia, whom he never knew, is dying, and returns after forty years to a town where his inheritance makes him enemies.
Kresnik 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Jakob's Prayer”
Dušan Merc · 51 when first published
Novel · 291 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:During the Second World War a young priest from a wealthy family, who has chosen to serve the poor villagers of his parish, tries through prayer to stand by his people as the war tears the community apart.
Kresnik 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“I Will Part the Foam from the Waves”
Feri Lainšček · 44 when first published
Novel · 317 pages · Love, Historical, Crime
AI-generated summary:During the First World War a young woman in Prekmurje who never wanted a husband marries an older river supervisor and moves to Murska Sobota, where she discovers the dark sources of his wealth.
Kresnik 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Boštjan's Flight”
Florjan Lipuš · 66 when first published
Novel · 134 pages · War, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In rural Carinthia during the Second World War a sensitive six-year-old boy sees his mother taken away by gendarmes, never to return, and grows up withdrawn, with only his love for a farm girl as hope.
Kresnik 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Saga of the Suitcase”
Nedeljka Pirjevec · 71 when first published
Novel · 375 pages · Family, Autofiction, Historical
AI-generated summary:A woman who calls herself Dominka in the third person tells the story of her Primorska family, her gentle father, her mother and her sisters, through letters, photographs and the turmoil of the 20th century.
Kresnik 2003 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Lieutenant from Vipota”
Miloš Mikeln · 72 when first published
Novel · 425 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:In November 1942 a bedraggled young Slovene brought into a German gendarmerie post in occupied Slovenia turns out to hold papers that open every Nazi door, and his past in pre-war Ljubljana slowly unfolds.
Kresnik 2003 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Sextant”
Štefan Kardoš, Norma Bale, Robert Titan Felix · Štefan Kardoš 36, Norma Bale 30, Robert Titan Felix 30 when first published
Novel · 281 pages
AI-generated summary:Three thirty-somethings in Prekmurje, a poet, a woman and a man haunted by inner voices, try in different ways to escape their stifling surroundings; their stories meet in a Murska Sobota bar on a football night.
Kresnik 2003 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Tango in Silk Clogs”
Ted Kramolc · 80 when first published
Novel · 293 pages · Love, Migration
AI-generated summary:In Toronto an immigrant painter drives his young lover and model to the airport for what she says is a family visit, and soon learns she has lied and left him for Los Angeles.
Kresnik 2003 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Viktor Jelen, Dreamer”
Vladimir P. Štefanec · 38 when first published
Novel · 265 pages
AI-generated summary:A dreamy young trainee who edits a newspaper's light-news column, collecting bizarre stories, is sure he is destined for great things, though every chance at success turns out differently than he hopes.
Kresnik 2002 · Shortlist
Fužinski bluz
Andrej E. Skubic · 34 when first published
Novel · 206 pages
AI-generated summary:On 13 June 2000, the day Slovenia plays Yugoslavia at football, four neighbours on the tenth floor of a tower block in Ljubljana's mixed Fužine estate each try to change something in their lives.
Kresnik 2002 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Deafness”
Jože Hudeček · 64 when first published
Novel · 198 pages
AI-generated summary:A retired tailor whose wife has followed their son to America lives alone in the old town of Ljubljana, talking to himself and to God, until strange things begin to happen to him.
Kresnik 2002 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Loser”
Lenart Zajc · 34 when first published
Novel · 297 pages
AI-generated summary:Over two years a trainee lawyer keeps a diary of his own days and those of his best friend, an idealistic philosophy and history teacher at a secondary school, both of them drinking heavily.
Kresnik 2002 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Night in Europe”
Polona Glavan · 27 when first published
Novel · 211 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:On a night train from Paris to Amsterdam at the end of August 1998, young interrailers from all over the world share compartments, memories, quarrels and loves in five linked stories.
Kresnik 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Mr Pepi, or The Early Search for a Name”
Jože Snoj · 66 when first published
Novel · 683 pages · Autofiction, Family
AI-generated summary:An ageing writer looks back over his family and his own life in the 20th century, from a childhood shaped by a storytelling father to the questions of who he is and why he bears the name Jože.
Kresnik 2001 · Shortlist
Morje v času mrka
Mate Dolenc · 55 when first published
Novel · 259 pages · Nature
AI-generated summary:An ageing intellectual who left the mainland and its civilisation to live as a fisherman on an island looks back on his life, his books and a lost love, and faces one last struggle with a great fish.
Kresnik 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Shadows in the Eye”
Matjaž Zupančič · 41 when first published
Novel · 287 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:After a schoolgirl drowns while fleeing a classmate who raped her, her brother returns from Australia to Ljubljana and, with her former lover, plots revenge on the two young men he holds responsible.
Kresnik 2001 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Colour of Rain, or The Dwarf from the Pilvax Café”
Zdenko Kodrič · 51 when first published
Novel · 302 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:A painter from Prekmurje arrives in Budapest between the wars, falls in with the bohemians and revolutionaries of the Pilvax café, and travels to Ljubljana hoping an exhibition will finally bring him recognition.
Kresnik 2000 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Dog Tango”
Aleš Čar · 28 when first published
Novel · 227 pages
AI-generated summary:In Ljubljana in August 1999 a young, broke writer races around the city in his small car, swinging between grand plans, money-making schemes and confusion as he tries to pull his chaotic life together.
Kresnik 2000 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Stowaway”
Dušan Merc · 47 when first published
Novel · 345 pages
AI-generated summary:A former foreign legionnaire, back from wandering the seas, lives in a basement flat in Ljubljana and works as a caretaker at the opera, drifting between confused affairs while he longs for one woman.
Kresnik 2000 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Rooster's Breakfast”
Feri Lainšček · 40 when first published
Novel · 231 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A young apprentice at a car repair shop on the edge of a small town joins the eccentric mechanic's circle of drinking friends, all dreaming of change, and falls in love with the wife of the local nightclub owner.