Vlada Urosevic

Vlada Urošević (Skopje, 1934) is a poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, literary and art critic, anthologist, and translator. He holds a PhD in Philology and is a retired full professor at the Blaže Koneski Faculty of Philology at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, where he taught the history of 19th- and 20th-century European literature. He is a member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the European Academy of Poetry, the Slavic Academy of Literature and Art, and a corresponding member of the Académie Mallarmé in Paris.

He has been an active presence on the Macedonian literary scene since the mid-1950s. He published his first collection of poetry, Another City, in 1959. He is the author of an extensive and wide-ranging body of work encompassing poetry, prose, essays, travel writing, art criticism, and anthologies. He is one of the most prominent representatives of Macedonian fantastic literature, with surrealism, myth, dreams, and imagination interwoven throughout his work. Among his most significant poetry collections are Diving Bell (1975), Hypnopolis (1986), Secret Gold (2016), and Labyrinth (2019); his notable collections of short stories include Signs (1963), The Night Coach (1972), A Unicorn Hunt (1983), Skopje Stories (1988), and Secret Mission (2013); while his novels include The Taste of Peaches (1965), My Cousin Emilia (1994), The Court Poet in a Flying Machine (1996), Wild League (2000), Dragon’s Bride (2008), and Macun (2018).

He has translated works by Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, Henri Michaux, Jacques Prévert, and Alain Bosquet into Macedonian, as well as selections of poetry by Oskar Davičo, Vasko Popa, and Miodrag Pavlović. For his literary and translation work, he was first named a Knight and later an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Government of the French Republic. His books have been translated into English, Bulgarian, German, Danish, Italian, Polish, Russian, Slovenian, Serbian, French, Croatian, and Spanish.

He is one of the founders of the Struga Poetry Evenings. He has won the award for the best poem read at the festival three times, the Miladinov Brothers Award for the best poetry collection three times, and, in 2023, the Golden Wreath, the highest honour of the Struga Poetry Evenings. He is also the recipient of the Grigor Prličev Award and the Racin Recognition, the Halide Edip Adıvar Award of the Turkish PEN Centre, the Great Flying Feather Award at the international poetry festival Slavic Embrace in Varna, and the Sergei Yesenin Order of the Union of Russian Writers. In 2024, the Republic of Serbia awarded him the Order of Sretenje, First Class, for outstanding contributions to literature and culture.