The writer László Krasznahorkai was honored with the Milovan Vidakovic Award in Újvidék, at the opening of the Prozefest international prose festival, reported the Serbian daily Vecernje novosti.

According to the award, the 68-year-old Kossuth and József Attila award-winning Hungarian writer earned the Milovan Vidakovic Award with his postmodern, dystopian and melancholic oeuvre.

When receiving the recognition, László Krasznahorkai emphasized that he was very surprised by the recognition, but at the same time very happy about it. As he said, when he found out that he had been awarded the prize, he had to find out who the award was named after. During the research, he found out that Milovan Vidakovic had a debate with language reformer Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic about the positive and negative effects of language change. "I'm sure I wouldn't decide in either direction, for me these two directions that they represented somehow mean the same thing, and I see the embodiment of these two directions in the list of those who have won this award so far" - he explained.

The award was previously received by György Konrád, Peter Handke, Orhan Pamuk and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others.

The namesake of the recognition, Milovan Vidakovic (1780-1840), is a Serbian writer, the creator of the Serbian version of the novel genre, a representative of the ideas of the Enlightenment and the sentimentalist style.

Source: Magyar Hírlap

Image: Vecernje novosti