The 2005 Vilenica Award, the international award for literature, was conferred on the authors Ilma Rakusa in Karl-Markus Gauss at a ceremony in the cave of the same name on Saturday evening. This year the jury selected two winners to celebrate 20 years of the Vilenica International Literature Festival.
Addressing the ceremony, the president of the Slovenian Writers' Association Vlado Zabot summarised the thoughts of the 2002 laureate Ana Blandiana, saying the festival has grown into a movement transcending political systems and economical crises while maintaining its focus on uniting values and building international solidarity.
Zabot expressed his conviction that cultural ties are nowadays being established in a more intensive manner than ever before. Such ties are created by free nations and free individuals, while the freedom and autonomy of national cultures today form one of the fundamental principles of the EU, he continued.
He concluded by stressing that culture should be safeguarded and protected from excessive exploitation by politics, ideology, commerce and tourism, while it should fight universialisation that would diminish the existing cultural differences.
The first of this year's laureates, Switzerland's Ilma Rakusa, whose extensive oeuvre includes poems, translations and essays, has already received a number of international awards for her work. She translates from French, Russian and Hungarians.
In her speech she admitted that she felt like a fish in water, surrounded by three important elements of her life: literature, Central Europe and the Karst. She praised the official and individual discussions and talks she had with her literary counterparts, adding that she feels happy to be a part of the Vilenica family.
The other laureate is the Austrian author and literary theoretician Karl-Markus Gauss, who too has received many awards for his work, which has been translated into 14 languages. Since 1991 he has published and edited the magazine "Literatur und Kritik".
In his speech he praised the "melancholic writers", "humanist innkeepers" and "desperately amusing intellectuals", saying that the path that has led him to Vilenica was beset by many benevolent minds.
"They are to thank for my getting the Vilenica prize, a prize that is one of the most beautiful a man like me can be awarded in Europe," he concluded.
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