HAUS FÜR POESIE

It is her seventh poetry publication, for which she received the NIN Prize for Novel of the Year, one of Serbia’s most important literary awards. The German translation by Mirjana and Klaus Wittmann, Kinder (Edition Korrespondenzen 2025), was awarded the City of Münster Prize for International Poetry. A previous German translation, Peter Urban’s bevor sich alles zu drehen anfängt (Edition Korrespondenzen 2017), had already appeared earlier. In both volumes, Marković remains faithful to the above motto: to forget nothing. At times almost unbearable in their unflinching precision, her descriptions – of a youth shaped by violence and upheaval, and of her present life with a cognitively impaired son and a mother suffering from dementia – push language to its limits. The register ranges from mocking to melancholic self-pity to tenderness – whether she writes about childhood abuse, the feeling of not belonging, or about an early, uncompromising desire to become an artist who will be remembered. Her thought patterns repeatedly circle around what might have been, around a life passing incomprehensibly quickly, and a lost youth: “it’s been one hundred thousand million days / one hundred million nights / since I’ve been dragged out of my mother’s stomach / I still want to return there”.

Milena Marković in conversation with Ljubica Šljukić Tucakov

The event will be held in Serbian with interpretation into German.
Kindly supported by ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen.

Funded by: Traduki