Uglješa Šajtinac

Uglješa Šajtinac ( Serbian Cyrillic : Угљеша Шајтинац; born October 1, 1971 in Zrenjanin , Yugoslavia ) is a Serbian playwright and writer .

life and work

A native of Zrenjanin has been in one respect theater history is written, it is the first Serbian playwright from which a piece of first in the English-speaking world premiere has been. The play is called Huddersfield and was created after his stay in the English city of the same name in 2000, where his play The Requisiteur was presented as a staged reading at the Festival of Contemporary European Theater at the University of Huddersfield . The English version of Huddersfield premiered in 2004 at the West Yorkshire Play House in Leeds and the Serbian premiere took place in 2005 at the Belgrade Yugoslav Drama Theater . Huddersfield was awarded the Sterijina Prize for the best contemporary play of the year at the Sterijino pozorje theater festival in 2005. He also co-wrote the script for the 2007 Serbian film of the same name. The German-language premiere of the play took place in 2005 at the Berliner Volksbühne under the direction of the German-based director and theater educator Predrag Kalaba.

The son of an actress and a writer, playwright and poet studied dramaturgy at the Belgrade University of the Arts and graduated in 1999 with a diploma . From 2003 to 2005 he was dramaturge at the Serbian National Theater in Novi Sad and since then he has been professor of dramaturgy at the Academy of Arts of the University of Novi Sad . Šajtinac received the European Union's Literature Prize and the Andrić Prize in 2014, and in 2018 he was the winner of the 2017 Isidora Sekulić Prize for the book The Woman from Juárez with short stories about the individual experiences of migrants against the background of political causes.

Together with Kerstin Specht and Robert Woelfl, Šajtinac was one of the ten authors of the international author's theater project Danube Drama , initiated by Wiener Wortstaetten in 2008 . The artistic result of the project was the piece Danube Drama or Terrible Coffee, Cheap Cigarettes , premiered in 2010 by the Slovak Divadlo bez domova (Theater Without a Home) in Studio 12 in Bratislava .

The artist's home region is the setting for the plot of his play Banat , which tells of the coexistence of the Serbs and Serbian Germans of Vojvodina and their political behavior in the Autonomous Banat during the Second World War based on the fates of various characters. The piece was presented in German for the first time in a staged reading at the Leipzig Book Fair 2012. About the artistic statement of his piece, the author wrote: “ What I wanted to say is that the Banat is the story of the people who were executed on the way home ... What about my generation? Why do we need to ask ourselves these eternal questions? Why were some killed and others not? Why did I survive? ".

Stefan Teppert, who is involved in associations, societies and cultural foundations of the expellees , writes: By parallelizing the two great illusions of the 20th century, communism and National Socialism , the playwright succeeds in maintaining a strong ambivalence and a relatively impartial, to present enlightening and multi-layered drama that looks for entanglement and guilt not only on one side , and in a review of the Transylvanian newspaper it was noted appreciatively that the young playwright deals with the subject in a non- doctrinal way . In the Vreme's theater review it says with regard to the topic: The fate of the Germans from Vojvodina certainly provides strong dramatic material. An entire ethnic community is punished without defining individual responsibility, although the fact is that a significant part of it has participated, willingly or involuntarily, passively or actively, in a criminal political project. Šajtinac also wrote the essay The Impossibility of a Common Fate on the topic , published in a trilingual book that was published with the support of the Munich Donauschwäbischen Kulturstiftung in Serbia including a DVD of a documentary film.

Šajtinac is also a recognized author of children's books, in 2014 he received the 2013 literary prize from the politician zabavnik for his children's book Čarna i Nesvet , a fable about a crow and an earthworm. The International Youth Library in Munich has included his children's book A Band of Unwanted Pets in its White Ravens catalog of recommended children's and youth literature , which was presented during the Frankfurt Book Fair 2019.

Bibliography (selection)

Novels and short stories

• Čuda prirode (miracles of nature), short stories , Književna omladina Srbije, Belgrade 1993, ISBN 86-7343-036-4 .
• Vok on! : manifest razdraganog pesimizma (Walk on !: Manifesto of happy pessimism), Narodna knjiga - Alfa, Belgrade 2007, ISBN 978-86-331-2655-7 .
• Sasvim skromni darovi (Very Modest Gifts), Roman, Arhipelag, Belgrade 2011, ISBN 978-86-523-0010-5 .
• Banatorijum (Banatorium), short stories, Arhipelag, Belgrade 2014, ISBN 978-86-523-0122-5 .
• Žena iz Huareza (The Woman from Juárez), short stories, Arhipelag, Belgrade 2017, ISBN 978-86-523-0233-8 .

Plays

• Rekviziter (The Requisiteur ), first performance at the Belgrade Drama Theater, 1999.
• Huddersfield , play, premiered at Leeds Play House, 2004.
• Hadersfild , play, Serbian premiere at Jugoslovensko dramsko pozorište (JDP), 2005; Guest performance at Theater Akzent Vienna , 2012.
• Banat ( Banat ), play, world premiere at the Yugoslav Drama Theater (JDP), 2007.
• 4 komada (four plays), Mali Nemo , Pancevo 2014, ISBN 978-86-7972-089-4 .

Children's books

• Vetruškina Ledina (hawks glade ), Studentski kulturni centar, Novi Sad 2005, ISBN 86-85983-03-7 .
• Čarna i Nesvet (The Čarna Crow and the Nesvet Earthworm), Pčelica, Čačak 2013, ISBN 978-86-6089-402-3 .
• Banda neželjenih ljubimaca (A gang of unwanted pets), Pčelica izdavaštvo, Čačak 2017, ISBN 978-86-6089-724-6 .

Translations

• Дуже скромні дари (Very Modest Gifts, translated by Kateryna Kalytko ), Tempora, Kiev 2016, ISBN 978-617-569-276-9 .
• Doni modesti (Modest Gifts, translated by Ljiljana Avirović), Atmosphere libri, Rome 2016, ISBN 978-88-6564-186-6 .

credentials

1. ↑ About the film Huddersfield , Film Center Serbia, accessed on December 3, 2019.
2. ↑ Observations on the dramaturgy concept of "Parasites" at the Volksbühne Berlin , article from Friday , accessed on November 4, 2019.
3. ^ Predrag Kalaba , official website, accessed November 20, 2019.
4. ↑ Biography on the Arhipelag Verlag website, accessed on June 29, 2018.
5. ↑ Biography , EU Prize for Literature, accessed November 4, 2019.
6. ↑ Von Going in Nothing , Article by Martin Leidenfrost in the newspaper Die Presse , accessed on December 3, 2019.
7. ↑ Repertoire 2010 , Studio 12 Bratislava, accessed on December 3, 2019.
8. ↑ Program of the Leipzig Book Fair 2012 , page 26, Albanischer Verlegerverband, accessed on December 5, 2019.
9. ↑ Stefan Teppert: Genozid in Titos Yugoslavia , p. 50, Kulturportal West – Ost, accessed on December 5, 2019.
10. ↑ Siebenbürgische Zeitung, volume 6 of April 15, 2006, page 10.
11. ↑ Obična razvučenost , theater review of the world premiere of the play Banat by Vreme magazine , accessed on June 29, 2018.
12. ↑ O Podunavskim Švabama / About Donauschwaben / About the Danube Swabians , ed. from the German association Kikinda and Mandragora Film Beograd, Belgrade 2012, ISBN 978-86-916193-0-5 , pp. 163–167. Documentary trailer , YouTube, accessed December 6, 2019.
13. ↑ Zabavnikova nagrada romanu Šajtinca "Čarna i Nesvet" , RTS , accessed on November 28, 2019.
14. ↑ White Raven's Catalog , International Youth Library, accessed November 4, 2019.
15. ↑ Press release , Theater Akzent, accessed on November 23, 2018.
16. ^ COBISS ( Union Catalog ) of the Serbian Libraries, accessed on June 29, 2018.
17. ↑ Ljiljana Avirović , Kulturvermittlung Steiermark , accessed on November 28, 2019.