The Grace of Cypresses

Stefica Cvek Award 2023

The Stefica Cvek Award, selected by Rebellious Readers, is given to books of rebellious and feminist literature. The Štefica Cvek Award celebrates the collective impact of works that challenge conventions, encourage critical thinking and offer a new perspective on the burning issues of our time.

Jury statement:

Gracija od čempresa by Želimir Periš is a collection of stories — but what stories! In this book you will find fairy tales dissolved by the tentacles of modernity, dystopia with a strong satirical core, an uncertain feminist utopia… This ingenious genre hybrid always places rebellious heroines at the centre of its stories who, even when they fall victim to male stupidity/rigidity/stubbornness, leave behind an inextinguishable spark of the idea of a better world. Periš manages to write in an openly engaged way, but without didacticism; add to this impression his obvious fondness for unexpected solutions and playful irony, and it becomes entirely clear why this is yet another book of which Štefica would be proud.

Lapis Histriae 2012

7th International Short Story Competition Lapis Histriae 2012, with the theme “Saints or Troublemakers?” Jury: Daša Drndić, Elis Deghenghi Olujić and Marcello Potocco.

Jury statement:

Želimir Periš’s story “How Grain is Threshed on the Threshing Floor” — grotesque in its furious series of examples of the “mysterious” deaths of villagers (predominantly women) in a village in the Dalmatian hinterland — exposes to satire the local tradition of invoking divine justice as a cover for brutal murders motivated by sheer desire for revenge, jealousy and envy. By choosing a pupil as narrator and setting the action in an unspecified, distant past, in the time of the emperor and his gendarmes, the author plays with a whole range of narrative devices, with dialectal and childlike, i.e. schoolroom, speech and, of course, with the transparent masks of a carnival of the adult world steeped in blood and hatred. It is a story of exceptional power, poetic completeness and satirical scope, which makes the reader laugh and at the same time prompts repeated re-readings, expanding one’s insights into the base motives behind the sacralisation of social injustice.

SFera 2002

In order to raise quality and popularize domestic SF writing, the Science Fiction Society SFera has awarded the annual SFERA prize since 1981. The SFERA prize is the first and oldest national genre award in Croatia.

The SFera prize for best SF&F story was awarded to the story “Millennium” (published in the collection under the title “The Tale of Gaspar, Melchior and the Terrible Beasts that Sow the Seeds of Evil Among the Gentle”)