Sharjah24: Ivo Andric was the erstwhile Yugoslavia’s most celebrated literary figure having won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961 for his book The Bridge on the Drina about life in Ottoman Bosnia. So when his hometown and final resting place Belgrade became the capital of the newly created Serbia in the 1990s, his stature grew in Serbian literature. Not surprisingly, Andric’s poster is the most prominent in the Serbian Publishers stall at the 43rd Sharjah International Book Fair, which got underway in Expo Centre Sharjah on November 6.
The publishers from Serbia are exhibiting at SIBF 2024 for the first time, and they are hopeful that the footfall will increase as the book fair gathers momentum especially on weekends. The 5,000-strong Serbian population in the UAE have an embassy and a cultural centre in the UAE; an outlet for books will further boost their assimilation in the country.
Commenting on their foray into the Sharjah book fair, Natasa Srdic, Director of publishing firm Partizanska Knjiga and a literary translator from Serbian to English and vice versa, said: “We are six publishers from Serbia, and we have a selection of authors and genres at SIBF. For instance, we have translations of Andric and Milorad Pavic, another classic writer. We have also displayed some new and aspiring authors whose books have been translated into English so that they can be made available to a wider audience. Apart from literary fiction, we have on display poems and short story collections.”
While half the books on display are in English, the other half is in Serbian in the hope that it will be of interest to the Serbian expatriate population in the UAE. The books are priced on the average at AED 40.
Srdic has translated from the Serbian Ana Vuckovic’s short novel Yugoslav. Her company recently started an Anglopolis series to do English translations which has so far come out with three books. Pavic’s novels such as The Inner Side of the Wind and Unique Item have been translated and published by Dereta, another publisher at the fair. The curiously named No Rules is another publisher at SIBF, and its Belgrade Bus Tales by Nenad Milenkovic Panic has a collection of interesting short stories that will appeal to non-native as well as Serbian people.
Geopoetika Publishing, which won the London Book Fair’s Excellence Awards 2018 in the Literary Translation Initiative category, is also exhibiting its books. Cigoja and Treci trg are the other two Serbian publishers at SIBF. Of the six publishing houses, five are run by women.
SIBF 2024, which will run until November 17, has opened its doors to over 2,520 publishers from 112 countries, and is celebrating Morocco as the Guest of Honour. The 12-day cultural extravaganza, organised by the Sharjah Book Authority, is themed ‘It Starts with a Book’, and has in store 1,357 activities for children and adults alike.
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