Ranko Pavlović, a writer from Banja Luka, yesterday at the International Festival of Contemporary Author's Fairy Tales, organized by the Phoenix Publishing House in Skopje, together with four authors from Ukraine, Poland, Uzbekistan and Northern Macedonia was awarded the best fairy tale, in competition with more than 300 authors. various parts of the world.

On that occasion, but also because of the forthcoming publication of the book of short stories "The Terrible Court", which was published by the Association of Writers of the Republic of Srpska, he spoke for "Nezavisne".

NN: You were awarded for the best fairy tale at the international festival in Skopje. Which fairy tale is this?

PAVLOVIĆ: The title of the fairy tale is "The Brave Shepherd and the Devil's Apprentice". As is usually the case in fairy tales, she talks about the conflict of good and evil, embodied in a young poor village servant, who will eventually be rewarded, and a perverted villain when the devil himself will take him as his apprentice and who will, of course, for his atrocities to be punished. The plot is not set in some imaginary space, but in the reader's recognizable village and forest next to it, and the heroes are not some mythical monsters, but people of flesh and blood.

NN: Koliko su po Vašem višedecenijskom iskustvu aktuelne bajke među savremenim piscima?

PAVLOVIĆ: Nema mnogo bajkopisaca jer teško je u tom žanru, među poznatim autorima, osvojiti odgovarajuće mjesto. Za mene je bitnije pitanje koliko je bajka aktuelna među čitaocima. Na nedavnom međunarodnom online naučnom skupu o savremenoj autorskoj bajci moje saopštenje, naslovljeno “Iz mračnih šuma i pećina – u kosmička prostranstva”, naišlo je na vrlo dobar prijem. Zalažem se, naime, da bajku osavremenimo u motivsko-tematskom pogledu. Spoznaje djeteta 21. vijeka nisu iste kao njihovog vršnjaka prije dva ili tri vijeka. Zato sam poručio: izvedimo dijete iz začaranih dvoraca i odvedimo ga u kosmička sazvježđa, gdje sigurno možemo naći izmaštane junake koji bi rado da se skuće u bajci!

NN: You are the winner of a really large number of awards… What does this one for a fairy tale mean to you?

PAVLOVIĆ: I, in a literal sense, accept it as a reward for fairy tales, a genre that retreats a bit before other works intended for the youngest readers. Just before the end of last year, the publishing house "Odyssey" in Belgrade published a selection from my previous four books of fairy tales, entitled "The Princess in the Pebble". Critics, mostly on the portals of fantastic literature, assessed it as the return of the fairy tale to the literary scene, and ranked me among the most important Serbian fairy tale writers. I have also published two novels - fairy tales, so somehow I experience this award as a recognition of my entire work in this field.

NN: These days, you participated in the project of the Association of Writers of the Republic of Srpska "Writers from textbooks and readings", within which you hung out with the children of regional schools in the vicinity of Banja Luka. Are socializing with the youngest age the favorite for a writer?

PAVLOVIĆ: There is no better way for a book to get closer to a child, to popularize it and to create future readers than for writers to go to school. If it were unreservedly accepted by the educational authorities, they would not regret the means and effort to get the writers to those regional departments where there are only a dozen or maybe fewer students. The joyful looks of the children, their radiant faces, are the greatest reward for the writer.

NN: A collection of short stories "The Last Judgment" was recently published, in which you drew a lot from your own childhood. What can you tell us about the content of this book and its journey to the reading room?

PAVLOVIĆ: The short stories have been written in the last ten years and I consider this book to be my best narrative achievement. I brought a lot of crumbs of my childhood memories into it, and in order to make interesting for the reader what happened half a century ago, which I did not witness, I tried to bring it all closer to him through interesting phantasmagoric scenes. In the reading room, as it is in our country, without or with very few real bookstores and with a long way to the library shelves, the collection, judging by the echoes that come to me, was well received ..