On the occasion of the official opening of the 27th Vilenica International Literary Festival, held on 5 September in Lipica, Slovenia, CEI Deputy Secretary General Zoran Jovanovic awarded the CEI Fellowship for Writers in Residence 2012 to Ajla Terzić, from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
As explained by the CEI Fellowship Committee, Ajla Terzić is “one of the most gifted and vivacious literary voices of her generation”. Born in 1979 in Travnik, she received several awards for her short stories and published her essays in various media. Her columns and articles are regularly featured in newspapers and magazines, such as the Sarajevo-based daily Oslobodjenje and the Belgrade based weekly Vreme. Her works include the collection of poetry Kako teško pišem (How Difficult it Is for Me to Write, 2004) as well as the novels Lutrija (Lottery, 2009) and Mogla je biti prosta priča (It Could Have Been a Simple Story, 2011). For a long time she has been researching the works of Ivo Andrić and is a member of the Andrić Museum’s publishing committee in Travnik.
Ajla Terzić applied to the CEI Fellowship with a literary project about the life of Lady Dickinson, a young English artist, whose interest in the traditional arts of the Balkans brought her to Bosnia in 1920s, where she founded a technical school and took part in cultural exchanges between Yugoslavia and Great Britain. This partly historical novel takes place on a territory which is par excellence a crossroad of different cultures, although it is also a place filled with blood and tragedy. By ways of confronting the past and the present, the novel connects Eastern and Western Europe with the help of the story about this unique entrepreneur, who was able to transform the contrast between different cultures into a fertile and lively exchange.
Since 2006, the CEI Fellowship for Writers in Residence has been awarded by the CEI as part of the International Literary Festival Vilenica, in collaboration with the Slovene Writers’ Association. The Fellowship seeks to promote the work of young perspective writers from non-EU CEI countries. The award of 5.000 EUR is to be used to spend three months in any CEI Member State of the candidate’s choice, during which the author is expected to work on a literary project.
The programme of the 27th Vilenica International Literary Festival is available here.
For information: fabro@cei.int