Deca

Milena Marković belongs to the subset of authors whose writing can be both very direct as well as highly lyrical in its sensitivity. This is especially true of Deca [Children], her autobiographical novel in the form of a long poem. In it, the writer revisits her earliest childhood memories from the early 1980s and everything in between to the present day – living with a son with intellectual disability and a mother, who suffers from dementia, in Belgrade. She thinks back to the things that are important to her, those moments and experiences that have shaped her: childhood traumas, the joys of swimming in the sea, drugs, and a passion for handsome men. All of this is held together by Marković’s artfully stripped down everyday language and her unmistakable and unique voice, which combines rebelliousness with melancholy, vulgarity with sublimity, and harshness with tenderness. For Deca, Milena Marković received the NIN Prize for the best novel of 2021.