All prizes Serbia
NIN-ova nagrada
Serbia · Since 1954 · For books in Serbian
Awarded each January by a jury of critics of the Belgrade weekly NIN to the best novel of the previous year; the prize is named for that year (the NIN Prize for 2010 went to a novel published in 2010). Open to novels written in Serbian. The jury publishes a shortlist of finalists before choosing the winner.
The NIN Prize for the novel of the year was founded in 1954 by the Belgrade news weekly NIN; its first winner was Dobrica Ćosić's Koreni. Every year a jury of five critics reads all the novels submitted from the previous year's production, often well over a hundred, and announces a shortlist of a few finalists, published as the uži or najuži izbor. A few days later, usually in mid-January, the jury picks the winner, often by a majority vote whose split is made public, and the prize is presented later that month. It is widely regarded as the most important Serbian literary award.
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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 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 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 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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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 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
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 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 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
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
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.