ŽIVKO GROZDANOSKI
Macedonia
Živko Grozdanoski (1986) is a Macedonian writer and current president of the Writers' Association of Macedonia. He is the author of several collections of short stories, novels, children's books and poetry. In 2020, under the logo of "Bulevar Sloboda", he published the trilingual (in Macedonian, Greek and English) thematic anthology "If I were you", which is composed of poetic and prose works by the thirteen authors of "reviews" represented in "50 short stories". In 2021, he published "Five stories from around the world" in "Čudna šuma", which in 2022 The Macedonian Association of Publishers will award it the first prize for the best children's book published between two editions at the Skopje Book Fair. In 2023, "The White Mice, The Terrible Infestation of Green Lice, The Black Sheep" comes out of the press, which at the "Litera" festival in 2024 received the award for the best text. He leads a workshop on creative autofiction writing.
The Last Name of the Future
A child accompanies his grandfather to a nearby hill above the city, where they release helium balloons into the sky. In an instant the balloon disappears, and a small white bird appears in its place.
Such days become beautiful memories, but the child grows into a man with a small invisible defect under the sternum - his body is often eaten away by emptiness and he becomes obsessed with the aging of people. "Homecoming" should be the only other name for old age. "Tishina" is the second name of Zale, the river beyond the window. The future has a thousand names, but what is the last one?
The story of the life of Joha, a tunnel engineer from Jena, East Germany, whose life changes radically after he is sent to work in an abandoned place in the south of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A story about bodies, loneliness, journeys and the life we live and imagine and succeed and want to remember. The story of a man who, at last, takes his grandson to the nearby hill from his childhood, looks at the balloon in his little hand and thinks about how all things - in their time and in a miraculous way - fall into place.