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DRAGAN VELIKIĆ
Acceptance of the Prozart Award 2025 speech

At the very beginning, allow me to thank Ermis Lafazanovski, President of the Jury of the International Festival "PRO-ZA Balkan," Aleksandar Prokopiev, Artistic Director, and Dejan Trajkoski, Director of the Festival, for the "Prozart" Award.

The significance of an award is defined by its laureates. Throughout its 14 years of existence, "Prozart" has honored writers who have created authentic literary worlds. It is a pleasure to be in such company.

My very first trip in life took me to Macedonia, to Ohrid. I was only 20 months old. Two decades later, in the spring of 1974, I returned to Macedonia as a keyboardist in Zdravkо Čolić's backing band, touring the length and breadth of the country: from Kumanovo and Tetovo to Struga and Ohrid, from Delčevo and Strumica to Štip and Probištip, from Prilep and Gostivar to Kavadarci and Veles, from Strumica and Gevgelija to Skopje and Sveti Nikole.

What a counting rhyme!

Half a century later, upon hearing the news that I had been awarded the "Prozart" Award, scenes from that distant Macedonian tour flashed through my memory. So many towns and places were inscribed into that month-long journey. It was a time when I was torn between music and literature. In the end, the computer keyboard prevailed over the musical keyboard. I became a writer. Novels and translations followed one after another. Literature creates vast spaces. How many worlds exist within us thanks to the books we have read. Thanks to translators, we sail across the expanses of world literature.

This is the moment to express my gratitude to the translators who brought my novels to the Macedonian language. I was fortunate enough to be translated by Dimitar Baševski, Jelena Lužina, and Risto Lazarov.

The real landscape in which the destiny of every individual takes shape does not depend solely on them. We choose neither the language nor the nation into which we are born. Nor do we choose the time or space in which we spend our earthly lives. But we choose our path; we choose the way we walk under the stars.

That real landscape eludes the internal lenses that attempt, for a fleeting second, to capture a single frame inscribed with the entire inventory of life: every face caught in passing, the rustle of leaves in the canopy of an unnamed boulevard at dusk, the smell of stagnant water, the intonations of banal sentences spoken in the voices of strangers—an entire universe trembling in the foundations of an edifice built by conscious intentions and decisions, but also by secret intimations and a magma of presentiments.

We would know so much more about our lives if only we could decipher the signs that, in our limitation, we call destiny. What we can comprehend is negligible compared to what flows past us. But that does not lessen our responsibility. In the eternal repetition of the same, every human being has their earthly time—and not only time, but also the opportunity to leave a trace, to refrain from surrendering to the elements, to change, and to become better.

There is no single, unmovable, coherent truth. There are only interpretations—not merely as purely rational categories, but as emotional experiences that shift depending on how we come to understand certain things.

A writer, in essence, decodes the world around them, creating a personal version of reality that—if the writer possesses talent and strength—can remain compelling to readers in times yet to come.