The Young Writer’s Forum
has been selected as the national jury by the organizer of the European Union Prize for Literature.
Free Kicks
The short story collection ‘Free Kicks’ has been nominated for the European Prize for Literature, awarded by the European Union through the Creative Europe programme, for 2026. Fourteen candidates have been nominated for this year’s European Union Prize for Literature. The winners will be announced during the Warsaw Book Fair. All authors on the shortlist will be continuously promoted on the European scene, with the aim of reaching a wider and international audience, as well as connecting with readers beyond their national and linguistic boundaries.
© Nataša Vujović
Vladimir Vujović (1991, Bar) writes novels and short stories. He graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Belgrade and completed his specialization at the Military Medical Academy. He has published the novels ‘Silencio’ (2017), ‘Burning the Joshua Tree’ (2021), and ‘Conversations with the Witch’ (2025), which was shortlisted for the NIN Award for Best Novel of the Year for 2025 as well as for the Belgrade Winner Award. His short story ‘Intervention’ earned him the first prize at the Podgorica Art Festival in 2018. He is also the recipient of the Đura Đukanov Award for 2025 for his short story collection ‘Free Kicks’ (2025).
The short story collection ‘Free Kicks’ demonstrates the author’s extraordinary skill in shaping form and his command of the narrative techniques of the short story. Vladimir Vujović’s storytelling is both universal and intimate, combining the historical and the contemporary, the real and the fantastic, through a dynamic stream of consciousness, precise psychological characterization, and reflective irony. Vujović’s work is characterized by a high degree of intertextual sophistication, while the narrative is deeply imbued with both lyrical and existential dimensions. The collection is characterized by highly layered, tense prose that is simultaneously philosophical, ironic, and emotionally intense, especially in those parts where Vujović uses satire and irony to comment on the academic world, social norms, and technological phenomena.
Podgorica, 10.03.2026
A literary evening featuring Vladimir Vujović at the Culture Information Center ‘Budo Tomović’ in Podgorica.
Sampas
The novel ‘Sampas’ has been nominated for the European Prize for Literature, awarded by the European Union through the Creative Europe programme, for 2023. Thirteen candidates have been nominated for this year’s European Union Prize for Literature. The winners will be announced during the Leipzig Book Fair. In addition to the awarded novel, according to the new rules regarding this award, five more novels from this selection will be singled out.
Ilija Đurović was born in 1990 in Podgorica, Montenegro. Đurović writes prose, poetry, plays and movie scripts. His first book of prose, ‘They Do It so Beautifully in Those Great Romantic Novels’, came out 2014 in Yellow Turtle Press, a small Montenegrin publishing house he runs. This was followed by ‘Black Fish’ (2016) and the poetry book ‘Brink’(2018), which received an award at a literature festival in Belgrade. Đurović has been living in Berlin since 2013 and living as a versatile freelance author and publicist. In 2019 he was co-winner of the Montenegrin theatre award for the best contemporary drama, ‘Sleepers’. His first novel, ‘Sampas’, was shortlisted for NIN Award for Best Novel of the Year for 2021.
© Mirko Radonjić
The novel ‘Sampas’ is written in the form of a road novel, where through fragment of a journey we follow the tale of two young people who travel through central and southern Montenegro, where they, as the main characters, illuminate the complexities of their individual fates, but also the collective experience of the spirit of the place and the time in which the story unfolds. The different events and internal sensations of the protagonists are conditioned by the social and political realities and the atmosphere of the tale, which strengthens their desire to leave Montenegro in search of a different, better life. The milieu within which the characters in the novel seek their ‘sampas’ (a local term symbolising freedom, but also wanderlust) is that of contemporary Montenegro, or the ex-Yugoslav context. Alongside the political references in the novel (the action takes place over an election weekend) ‘Sampas’ also works at the level of a love story, where the couple’s relationship is explored, and thus the story becomes an exploration of the idea of that relationship, indeed of all relationships.
Where We Are
KIC ‘Budo Tomović’
Vaka Đurovića 12
81 000 Podgorica
Montenegro
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