Skopje, 1 March 2022 (MIA) - "Hidden Desires, Restless Travels", a novel by Macedonian writer Vladimir Jankovski, is the Macedonian candidate for the European Union Prize for Literature (EUPL), it has been announced. Established in 2009, EUPL is an initiative highlighting the best new prose writers from Europe. Since the beginning of this award, each participant country declared one national winner, but the concept changes in 2022. Instead of a winner being chosen in each country, a 7-member committee will decide one overall winner, and five runners-up. Alongside the selected winner, all nominated authors will be continuously promoted on the European literary stage in order for their works to reach a wider audience, as well as to overcome the language barriers between their national literature. This year, authors and works from Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Norway, Romania, Slovakia, Spain and Ukraine have also taken part in the contest. "Hidden Desires, Restless Travels is a mosaic novel about four characters who live in Skopje, combining the stories of around fifty characters from various places. Thematically, the book deals with the relationship between what's real and what's virtual, the question of professional success and success in the art world, the link between external achievements and the search for oneself which has two different faces," the publishing house Antolog says in a statement. Professor and literary critic Lidija Kapushevska-Drakulevska believes that the "especially interesting" part of the novel is "its chronotopicity, the linking of fates of people from various corners of the world, as well as the reduction of the human existence to a chain of unions and separations, passing people by, and harmonies". Literary critic Aleksandra Jurkovski believes that Jankovski's book is "a riddle with many answers. The mosaic of characters and their stories makes it interesting in a genre sense too, a novel which can be read as a collection of short stories, a corpus of seemingly unrelated stories". Born in 1977, Vladimir Jankovski graduated from the Department of Comparative Literature at the Blazhe Koneski Faculty of Philology in Skopje. He has published three novels: Hidden Desires, Restless Travels (2020), Invisible Loves (2015) and Eternal Present (2010). He got the Novel of the Year Award from the Slavko Janevski Foundation for his latest novel, and he also received a Racin Recognition Award for his novel Invisible Loves. dk/ba/