Uglješa Šajtinac

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

Biography

The son of an actress and the poet Radivoj Šajtinac studied Dramaturgy at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts of Belgrade’s University of Arts and graduated in 1999. He worked as a dramaturge at the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad from 2003 to 2005, then he became professor of dramaturgy at the Academy of Arts of the University of Novi Sad. He lives in his native place.^[1][2]

Šajtinac is the only Serbian playwright of whom a play (Huddersfield, 2004) was first performed abroad in English. The artist was inspired to write his play after visiting Huddersfield in 2000. In 2006, an U.S. American performance has been occurred at the TUTA Theatre in Chicago. He also participated in creating the screenplay for the same named film. The playwright received the Jovan Sterija Popović Award for his play Hadersfild at the Festival Sterijino pozorje 2005.^[3][4][5][6]

The writer is also laureate of some literary prizes such as the Biljana Jovanović Award 2007 for Walk on!, the Ivo Andrić Award 2014 for Banatorium, the European Union Prize for Literature 2014 for his novel Quite Modest Gifts and the Isidora Sekulić Award 2017 for his collected short stories The Woman from Juárez containing impressive and emotionally touching stories about individuals of global migration and its political reasons. The award-winning novel Quite Modest Gifts has already been published in Italian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Macedonian and Ukrainian translations.^[7][8][9]

Bibliography (selection)

Drama

• Rekviziter (The Property Master), Premiere at Belgrade Drama Theatre, 1999.
• Three contemporary European plays (by Sofia Fredén, Werner Schwab and Uglješa Šajtinac), Alumnus, Leeds 2000.
• Huddersfield (Oberon publishing, London 2004), World Premiere at Leeds Playhouse, 2004.^[10][11]
• Hadersfild (Huddersfield), Premiere at Yugoslav Drama Theatre, 2005.
• Banat (Banat), Premiere at Yugoslav Drama Theatre, 2007.
• 4 komada (Four Plays), Mali Nemo, Pancevo 2014, ISBN 978-86-7972-089-4.

Prose

• Čuda prirode : prilozi za odbranu poezije (Miracles of Nature: contributions to the defense of poetry), short stories, Književna omladina Srbije, Belgrade 1993, ISBN 86-7343-036-4.
• Čemer : libreto za krut košmar ili roman u pričama (Woe: libretto for a cruel nightmare or novel in stories), novel, Jefimija,Kragujevac 1998, ISBN 86-7016-016-1.
• Vok on! : manifest razdraganog pesimizma (Walk on!: manifesto of happy pessimism), short stories, Narodna knjiga – Alfa, Belgrade 2007, ISBN 978-86-331-2655-7.
• Sasvim skromni darovi (Quite Modest Gifts), novel, Arhipelag, Belgrade 2011, ISBN 978-86-523-0010-5.
• Banatorijum (Banatorium), short stories, Arhipelag, Belgrade 2014, ISBN 978-86-523-0122-5.
• Doni modesti (Modest Gifts), Atmosphere libri, Rome 2016, ISBN 978-88-6564-186-6.^[12]
• Žena iz Huareza (The Woman from Juárez), short stories, Arhipelag, Belgrade 2017, ISBN 978-86-523-0233-8.

References