Meet anti-war novelist lost in promotions

Sharjah - He said that novelists do not have to write bare truths but write about the imageries of people leaving their homes in war-stricken areas.

Award-winning Serbian writer Vladimir Arsenijevic called for books that crosses the boundaries of contemporary world and eyes on future of mankind at the 35th Sharjah International Book Fair, which concluded on Saturday.  
The Serbian anti-war novelist who craves for time to write after his successful first novel which deluged him with promotional trips, said: "I hardly had time to write because I had to travel a lot to honour 400 promotions initiated by my 60 foreign publishers worldwide. I need free time to wake up alone, have coffee and sit down to write. I lost that."
At 29, Arsenijevic became the youngest awardee of the NIN Literary Award, the biggest and most prestigious literary award for his first novel "In The Hold".
This novel has been translated into 20 languages, theatre play and was the best-seller in Serbia at the time of its publication in 1994. It was the first debut book which won 'Novel of the Year' award, giving him a place among the most translated Balcan writers.
His book, set at the backdrop of Battle of Vukovar in autumn 1991, was one of the first such work published in Serbia that discussed the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia. An internationally-acclaimed novel, he wrote it from his perspective who lived in the war-torn area.
In an interview he said that after the phenomenal success of his first book, he it took him three years to finish "Angela", the sequel of his novel, which talked about a young couple who met lot of tragedies during the war.
He said that novelists do not have to write bare truths but write about the imageries of people leaving their homes in war-stricken areas like his place in Yugoslavia.
"When we watch dying women and children, hordes of refugees on TV, we could not react because of numbness inside. The same imagery now appears in many in the Middle East as civil war rages on in places like Syria, Iraq and many other places," he said.
Born in Pula, SR Croatia, Arsenijevic popularly known as "Vlajsa", was a musician who played with a punk band called "Urbana Gerila" and "Berliner Strasse".  At 15, he decided to become a novelist, but he became a writer in 1994.
- afkarali@khaleejtimes.com

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