Kresnik to Lado Kralj for his novel I'll No Longer Skate on the Bayer

I Will No Longer Skate on the Bayer

Igor Bratož, the chairman of the jury, read out the jury's justification: 'The period of the Second World War is one of the most treated themes in Slovenian literature and literature in general - which means that it is also one of the most challenging for writers, as it requires the discovery and articulation of new perspectives and language. In his novel I Will No Longer Skate on the Bayer, Lado Kralj is not concerned with summarising a grand story that would function as a historical and literary commonplace, but rather with descending to the specific local level of interwar Šiška, which for the first time in Slovenian literature becomes a central inter- and post-war setting.

Here we get a vivid insight into what was happening on the ground, both in terms of the economic, educational and religious institutions operating in the area, the related security-intelligence operations, and the political-bureaucratic maneuverings and dealings within the occupation regime. King's novel is characterised by its layered writing, which is linked by a series of episodic chapters. While these are linked by a central character, Kralj adds other characters and voices, which is one of the key factors that make the interwar Šiška come alive before us as a specific place and setting. At the same time, Kralj's writing treads a fine line between fiction and documentary, which gives us a sense of living history when reading his novel.

The novel is a good realisation of the maxim that the universal is reached through the particular. But history can be alive precisely because it is treated in a literary fresh way, where Kralj expresses an attentiveness both to the contemporary genre hybridisation of the novel and to the dialectic of the central narrative line's centrality and mediocrity, between the dispersion of episodes and the continuity of the whole. For all these reasons, the jury believes that Lado Kralj deserves the 2023 kresnik prize, and thus to be posthumously inscribed among the key authors of contemporary Slovenian literature."