Grigor Vitez Commendation Award for 2020
Silvija Šesto and Vanda Čižmek for picture book THE ALPHABET OF THE UNLOVED ONES, Semafora

Extraordinary witty and satirically written short texts about animals linked to human professions and sorted in alphabetical order, but in such a way that the animals that illustrate the professions are these that are usually not loved, that are underestimated, feared from, or even disgusted by. Such an approach is completely new in the genre which tries to stress common character or phenotype similarities between humans and animals (alligator / film director, stray dog / goldsmith, hyena / politician, chinchilla / furrier, scops owl / gravedigger, goose / children’s writer, cancer / doctor, centipede / shoemaker, scorpion / astrologer, skunk / scavenger, etc.). The stories are written from an animal perspective, where animals rebel and protest the way people look at them and against the stereotypes. The texts have an ecological-activist undertone. Vanda Čižmek unobtrusively, with a simple black and white drawing, with only a few accents of color, follows the protagonists of this anti-alphabet, deliberately not distracting attention from the essence of the story itself.

Expert Committee of the Grigor Vitez Award for 2020

_Read more