EVALD FLISAR
Acceptance of the Prozart Award 2025 speech

Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, dear members of the jury!

I have no words to describe how grateful I am for receiving the distinguished PROZART award for literature, not only because it places me among a group of authors worth of the highest respect, but also, perhaps even more so, because most of the 80 years of my life and work have been spent far away not only from Macedonia but also from what is popularly known as the Balkans. Strange as it sounds, this is only my second visit to Macedonia (or North Macedonia, as I am obliged to call it now). The first one was when I was 17, together with a beautiful girl who was also 17. During the summer of 1962 we travelled down the Dalmatian coast and through the mountains of Montenegro to Macedonia, all the way to Ohrid, where we spent more than two weeks, swimming near the Church of St. John of Kaneo, more interested in each other than in Macedonia, which was quite normal at our age. After that I only drove through Macedonia twice, by car, on my way to Greece and back home. And that was that, until today. My second visit to this beautiful part of the world reminds me of the first one, and if I ask myself what is more important, young love or literature, I have to admit that they are both equally important.

But I am not here today to talk about teenage love. I am here to talk about books, or, in other words, about love of everything they can offer us. We all know what Bertolt Brecht said many years ago: “A book is a weapon—take it in your hands.” I don’t know whether he was aware that, like a weapon, a book can also be dangerous in the hands of someone who doesn’t know how to handle it. Much of what we find in books, in many books, can seriously damage the mind. On the other hand, a well-chosen and properly read book can shine into a person’s life like the sun, warming the spirit and filling it with joy and creativity. Unlike real weapons, however, books become less effective the more of them there are. Just like words: in the middle of a desert, a single sentence can take on cosmic meaning—but here, where we’re battered by an endless storm of words, most of them instantly turn into muddy water that soils our souls and then trickles into oblivion.

I’ve known for a long time, and have said it publicly many times, that there are too many, far too many books, and no one knows what to do with them—not publishers, not bookstores, not buyers, not readers. Maybe it's true that everyone carries at least one book inside them, but that doesn’t give them the right to write it, publish it, and try to sell it. Weeds, as gardeners know all too well, are incredibly resilient and quickly smother noble plants—simply by depriving them of light and space. Of course, writing and publishing a book, no matter how bad, is one of the basic human rights. Therefore, we must fight bad books with good readers—those who are well-read, informed, educated, and who instinctively know what’s good and what is merely reheated mush. I fear there are fewer and fewer such readers every year. And too few to trigger a natural selection process that would continuously prune the lush overgrowth of wordiness and reclaim fertile ground for words that are thoughtful, heartfelt, and authentic.

The poet Stefan George, leader of the fight against realism in German literature, supposedly had some of his books printed in runs of only a hundred copies, in an elitist attempt to distinguish them from "mass" literature. Should we therefore reduce print runs? Unfortunately, the matter is far more complicated. The number of copies sold doesn’t define a book’s quality. Let’s remember the eternal bestsellers: the Bible, Andersen’s fairy tales, War and Peace, and dozens more. A deliberately limited print run wouldn’t add or take away anything from a book’s value or importance. Elitist intellectual posturing has no place in today’s world. Where there is too much of everything and every value is in question, perhaps the only right approach is to surrender only to what stirs us, angers us, speaks to us personally, or in some other way “arrests” our attention. There simply isn’t enough time for anything else. Besides, print run reductions are already being effectively handled by the frenzied and dumbed-down book market. In how many copies is poetry published? Even for a good novel, the usual print run in my country, Slovenia, rarely exceeds 500 copies.

There’s nothing wrong with an author wanting to be read. Publishers too prefer to publish books that get a good reception and wide attention, which means more money for them. But it’s largely the publishers’ fault that this doesn’t happen as often as it used to. With the rise of the internet and social media, and the decreasing time and interest people have for reading books, they’ve faced a temptation they can’t resist: compensating for the loss by expanding their publishing programs. This isn’t just our problem—it’s global: everywhere, print runs are shrinking, while the number of books keeps growing. Where we once had one novel, now there are four. Where we had two manuals, we now have a thousand. Books are multiplying as if they were reproducing with each other. We’re caught in a vicious cycle: more and more books are chasing fewer and fewer readers, who in turn are avoiding more and more books.

Years ago, I was struck by a troubling realization—which has only intensified lately—that we, the artists of the word, those who mythologize the everyday to elevate it to a level where life gains meaning, are increasingly pushed into the shadows. Despite everything I’ve said about the necessity of story and myth in our lives, we cannot deny that factual literature has overshadowed us. That is, the kind that doesn’t mystify but explains, analyzes, cites, and gives instructions. Even V. S. Naipaul, one of the best English-language authors of Indian descent, once said he no longer found it meaningful to write novels. Oxford professor George Steiner dismissed literature altogether, as if it were a shameful habit of incorrigible masturbators. Of course, these aren’t fatal statements—after all, the death of the novel has been announced for three hundred years. And it’s still alive. But I think that readers prefer to turn to factual and instructional literature because they hope to find in “hard” facts a sense of certainty, a safe haven in today’s fluid landscape of values. They are mistaken. The feeling of safety is still most easily found in the modern version of myth: in the novel, in drama, in the short story. In the tale that is born in our imagination.

That there are too many, absolutely too many books in the world and no one knows what to do with them becomes painfully clear when you move from a smaller flat to a bigger one. How is it possible that a larger space has less room for books than the smaller one did? Did the books reproduce during the move? When they lie on the floor, their backs—or rather, their behinds—exposed, protruding rudely, arrogantly and intrusively (“Read me!”), you suddenly realize there are too many books. Not just in bookstores and libraries, but in your own home! How did you manage to accumulate so many covers and pages in your short life?

During the move to a bigger flat or a house, you discover books in your possession that would make some of your friends frown if they found them in your library. But most of all, you frown at yourself as you pick up certain volumes and have no idea why you bought them (or accepted them as gifts). Staring at carpets of books, which look like they’ve been scattered by the wind from all directions, you’re seized by a mad urge to order a truck, call a student service, hire a hundred students to help load this literary wealth, and drive it to Congress Square in Ljubljana and toss the whole lot into the cleansing flames during the opening of the Slovene Book Days festival!

But no. Among these books, there are also those you’d defend with tooth and nail if anyone tried to take them. Never mind that these almost ten thousand books are, in a way, a record of your education and a reflection of “where the dog of your intellect points its paw” (this unbearable metaphor is from the brilliant book by the Irish writer Flann O’Brien). Think of the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Encyclopedia, the 1957 edition you bought secondhand at a flea market in Camden, London, for which you paid twice as much for shipping it by boat to Australia (where you intended to live), and then who knows how much to ship it back to London, and twenty years later to Ljubljana—only to open it maybe five times in your life (and each time discover that it contained incorrect, incomplete, or outdated information).

But don’t those 28 volumes of a useless encyclopedia—which crossed oceans because of your loyalty—contain, alongside their flawed information, also a part of your life’s history, the spirit of a past that you can’t conjure in any other way than through the books you once bought to own, to read, to learn from, to help you. When a memory sticks to a book, you cannot part with it, no matter how useless it is. That’s why some private libraries will remain unbearably vast. But that’s fine—I remember a visitor who, upon seeing my library, gasped: “Have you read all these books?” I replied: “Come on now, don’t you know I’m a writer? I only read the Bible—the other books are for decoration.”

Ladies and gentlemen, members of the jury, dear book lovers, the award with which you have decided to honour my work today, will become one of the most important decorations in my home. And in my heart. Thank you.