In 2004, the Dreamlike Book Fair in Istria established the annual Kiklop Award to evaluate publishing and overall book-related activities by applying high professional criteria. The Kiklop Award 2008 is given for book production achievements (sold in book-shops), whose publishers are registered in the Republic of Croatia, from 1st October 2007 to 30th September 2008. In 2007 the Award founders discovered a true and ideal partner – Glas Istre, already well-known as independent and sensitive to the book and culture, whose support should ensure this event to remain at the top. From this year on Arenaturist, PULS agency and City of Zagreb are also important supporters of the Fair.  

The Kiklop Award is given in 12 categories: editor of the year/edition of the year/fiction book of the year/my first book of the year/poetry collection of the year/non-fiction book of the year/essay book of the year/popular science book of the year/children’s book of the year/foreign author’s book of the year/translation of the year/book design of the year (based on entries), while category hit of the year is given to Croatian author and publisher according to data on selling/reading rates. The awards – bronze statues of Kiklop by Josip Diminić, academic sculptor and painter, will be given at the 14th Book Fair in Istria on 10th December 2008 – Histria hotel, 9 p.m. Director of the Awards Ceremony is Mario Kovač.

The programme board who has shaped the programme theme (Literary Nomads) are: Dušan Karpatsky, Daša Drndić, Aljoša Pužar, Neven Ušumović and Magdalena Vodopija.

West-East

Postmodern Ulysses doesn’t return home; his Ithaca is an unknown archipelago along whose shores he daringly roams. Nomad identity constructs and deconstructs itself in movement. The nomad embodies an energy of movement which is “ecological”; no one can sympathize more than him with the waste-covered planet. His themes are: self-regulation, disarmament, geopoetics.

The new Gaia Scienza is composed of such nomadic subjects. The erudite interdisciplinarity contained in them preserves the ecstasy of both playfulness and humble self-submission disguised by a figurative language which feeds upon impressions of immensity and the exact unutterableness of the Present, the Exterior. The nomad belongs to literature as far as he cannot escape it – what renders him a man of letters are his libidinality and a by far cursory demarcation of the field where he can feel his existence, though his passion for truth is scientific and the degree of his dissapointment verges on a desperate need for silence. The demythologization of self-affirmation – that is, of a quasi-spirituality persuading us to take its sweetened water for the expression of the power of desire, for the mysterious correspondence between the self’s experience and that of the world, pave the way towards an Ocean on which it is impossible to depart. Nomadic enthusiasm is nihilistic but its nihilism is not cynical, it is not an ecstasy of suicidal affirmation, resulting as it is from the meditative inspiration with the Unobjective, but an Unobjective that is present.