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Since 2010, Istria County – located near the border between Croatia, Slovenia and Italy – has been annually awarding the most read contemporary Croatian author in the public libraries of that region.

The BOOKtiga award doesn’t bring a great deal of money, but it is specific as it represents an important link between the author and his readership. A copy of the award-winning book travels for a month from one city to the next, from one library to the other, in order for the readers to write their impressions and messages to the author. In the end, the copy is handed to the author during the award-winning ceremony.

This year’s winner is the Croatian poet and prose writer, the president of the poetry manifestation Goran’s Spring, Ivica Prtenjača. More than 27,000 favourably inclined readers wrote in this travelling commemorative copy of the now numerously awarded novel Brdo.

In a little more than a hundred pages, the novel Brdo, with its exceptionally condensed plot, which is at the same time simple and clear, soft and light, and yet serious and powerful, tells the story of an anti-hero of our age, a middle-aged man who, appalled by the hypocrisies and false values, feels, as a typical urban dweller, tired and alienated. Prtenjača’s protagonist decides to fundamentally change the world he despises, through an existential act of displacement and voluntary isolation.