Mednarodna literarna nagrada KONS ® / KONS International Literary Award ® was founded in 2011 as an upright tool to fight oppressive atmosphere in the sombre perspective for the critical intellectuals and creative people in Slovenia after the university purge at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Primorska in Koper in 2010.
Taja Kramberger, whose future in a small and maffia-structured country was ruined in the purge, was the initiator of the idea to award the courageous poets and writers (women and men) who, through their entire life's work and attitude, have managed to maintain positions of humanity, charity and elemental honesty in the face of intrusive ideologies and invasive policies. She invited two women poets (Barbara Korun and Tatjana Jamnik) to join her project. Unfortunately, the project lasted only five years, as the two invited litterary colleagues incessantly intrigued one against the other (Jamnik intriguingly pushed out Korun in 2015), and finally both against Taja (from today's point of view, it seems that they were both a kind of regime "Putzfleck", vying for a priority informer's - Inoffizielle Mitarbeiterinnen - position alongside the couple of dissidents, Taja Kramberger and her husband Braco Rotar) who was not able to deal with delicate matters and visceal lies remotely from her French exile. Shortly afterwards, one of these two chambermaids stole Taja's translation of M. Salgado's novel, in an intrigue worthy of the regime manoeuvres of the mid-1930s in the Soviet Union. Taja finally had enough of "Slovene intrigues" and closed this chapter for good, refusing to renew the trademark "KONS" at the Slovene registration agency. (Future abuses cannot be ruled out.)
Nevertheless, the project "KONS" at its beginning seemed to be a generous and powerfull journey. Taja Kramberger spent an unforgettable evening with a poet Claribel Alegria in Managua, Nicaragua, in February 2013. Claribel Alegria was the second laureat of the KONS Award, and she accepted it with a noble emotion. The good memories are infinitely stronger than the idiot wind that swept the project away once and for all.
"KONS" Laureates were:
2011 - Iztok Osojnik (Slovenia)
2013 - Claribel Alegría (Nicaragua/Salvador)
2015 - the award shoud go to Radka Denemarková (Czech Republic), but something went wrong and T. Jamnik who should deliever it, for whatever reason, has failed in her task
2018 - Nataša Velikonja (Slovenia)
Taja Kramberger, whose future in a small and maffia-structured country was ruined in the purge, was the initiator of the idea to award the courageous poets and writers (women and men) who, through their entire life's work and attitude, have managed to maintain positions of humanity, charity and elemental honesty in the face of intrusive ideologies and invasive policies. She invited two women poets (Barbara Korun and Tatjana Jamnik) to join her project. Unfortunately, the project lasted only five years, as the two invited litterary colleagues incessantly intrigued one against the other (Jamnik intriguingly pushed out Korun in 2015), and finally both against Taja (from today's point of view, it seems that they were both a kind of regime "Putzfleck", vying for a priority informer's - Inoffizielle Mitarbeiterinnen - position alongside the couple of dissidents, Taja Kramberger and her husband Braco Rotar) who was not able to deal with delicate matters and visceal lies remotely from her French exile. Shortly afterwards, one of these two chambermaids stole Taja's translation of M. Salgado's novel, in an intrigue worthy of the regime manoeuvres of the mid-1930s in the Soviet Union. Taja finally had enough of "Slovene intrigues" and closed this chapter for good, refusing to renew the trademark "KONS" at the Slovene registration agency. (Future abuses cannot be ruled out.)
Nevertheless, the project "KONS" at its beginning seemed to be a generous and powerfull journey. Taja Kramberger spent an unforgettable evening with a poet Claribel Alegria in Managua, Nicaragua, in February 2013. Claribel Alegria was the second laureat of the KONS Award, and she accepted it with a noble emotion. The good memories are infinitely stronger than the idiot wind that swept the project away once and for all.
"KONS" Laureates were:
2011 - Iztok Osojnik (Slovenia)
2013 - Claribel Alegría (Nicaragua/Salvador)
2015 - the award shoud go to Radka Denemarková (Czech Republic), but something went wrong and T. Jamnik who should deliever it, for whatever reason, has failed in her task
2018 - Nataša Velikonja (Slovenia)
