Velibor Čolić – Recipient of the Vilenica Crystal 2026

The jury, composed of Martin Lissiach, Aleš Mustar, and Gregor Podlogar as chair, unanimously selected Velibor Čolić’s text A Handbook for Exiles as the recipient of the 2026 Vilenica Crystal, awarded for the best published text in the festival anthology.

A Scar on the Face of the World

In prose writing, two elements are, among others, essential if literature is to acquire its power, come fully alive, and reach the reader: the story itself and the way that story is conveyed through language. The Bosnian-French writer Velibor Čolić, a “migrant” and a “thousand-times-wounded dog,” as he has described himself elsewhere, is a master both of storytelling and of the manner in which he weaves his narratives, spinning them through his own sensibilities like a spider, connecting the threads of his own reality with that of Europe’s recent past and present.

A Handbook for Exiles, an excerpt from the novel of the same title, is a powerful and distinctive piece of the mosaic of Central European literature. It continues a tradition of writing marked by exile, the passage from one language to another and from one culture to another, and the search for meaning within the workings of vast systems—expressed also through personal experience and lyrical forms of expression, as well as through the recording of the unnoticed stories of ordinary people.

“Little by little, I realise that I am a refugee. A man without documents and without a face, without a present and without a future,” Čolić writes in this text.

This is literature that offers a form of redemption, but it is at the same time much more than that. It is an event in time, opening itself up to and absorbing the problems of the contemporary world, and is therefore also a story of our time, a story that belongs to us all. Through its masterful transformation of individual experience into something universally human, it allows us, as we read, to fully experience the scar on the face of the world.

Gregor Podlogar
Chair of the Vilenica Festival Jury
and Chair of the Jury for the 2026 Vilenica Crystal

On behalf of the Slovene Writers’ Association, we extend our heartfelt congratulations to the recipient!

Photo: Mankica Kranjec Ducheyne