Uglješa Šajtinac
Uglješa Šajtinac (Serbian Cyrillic: Угљеша Шајтинац; born 1 October 1971) is a Serbian novelist, children's book author, theater playwright, and university professor in Novi Sad. His mother, Gordana, is an actress at the town's National Theater, and his father, Radivoj, is a writer of cultural policy articles in various journals. Šajtinac is the husband of Sonja Veselinović. Both live in Zrenjanin.
Šajtinac's paternal grandfather, born in Šumadija, was a combat veteran in the Partizan Brigade of Žarko Zrenjanin.
Šajtinac studied at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts of Belgrade's University of Arts, graduated in 1999, and worked as a dramaturge at the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad from 2003 to 2005. He then became a professor at the Academy of Arts of the University of Novi Sad.
In theatre history, Šajtinac is the single Serbian playwright whose play Huddersfield was at first performed in English as a world premiere at Leeds Playhouse in 2004, inspired to write this play after visiting that town in 2000; the Serbian performance was shown at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre in 2005, and the German performance at Volksbühne Berlin.
He received the Sterijina Award for his play at the Sterijino pozorje Festival in 2005, and he participated in creating the screenplay for the same-named film.
Šajtinac wrote a dramatized adaptation of the novel Robinson Crusoe, which was performed by Theatre Playground under the title Life On A Desert Island as a family show for children in Central Park, Riverside Park, and Prospect Park in New York City in 2009. The Serbian premiere was in 2003, and his second play, based on a story from the novel Robinson and the Pirates, was performed the following year.
In 2010, Šajtinac participated as a co-author in creating the play Danube Drama or Awful Coffee, Cheap Cigarettes, which was realized by Wiener Wortstaetten as an international drama project, written by ten authors from ten countries, and staged by the Slovak Theater without Home in Bratislava.
Šajtinac is a laureate of several major literary prizes, such as the Biljana Jovanović Award 2007 for Walk on!, the Ivo Andrić Award 2014 for Banatorium, the European Union Prize for Literature 2014 for his novel Quite Modest Gifts, and the Isidora Sekulić Award 2017 for his collected short stories The Woman from Juárez, which contain narrations about individuals of global migration and its political causes. The novel Quite Modest Gifts has been published in Italian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Slovenian, Macedonian, and Ukrainian translations.
The International Youth Library added Šajtinac's children's book Gang Of Undesirable Pets (Banda neželjenih ljubimaca) to the White Ravens List for recommendable children and youth literature 2019. Šajtinac is a selected author of the French drama project Instant MIX, which is supported by Creative Europe. In 2017, his play Banat was introduced at the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques. In 2008, this play was translated by Chris Thorpe under the title Borderland, and in 2012, there was a German-speaking stage reading at the Leipzig Book Fair.
In 2003 Šajtinac wrote the screenplay for the short film True Story of an Umbrella, a Bicycle, a Bullet, and an Easter Bunny (Istinita priča o kišobranu, biciklu, jednom metku i uskršnjem zeki). He was its co-director and played a leading role.