Srđan Gagić
- Serbia -
Srđan Gagić was born in Bosanski Novi/Novi Grad, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1988. He received his Master’s Degree from the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, with a major in Serbian literature and language with comparative literature, where he also started his doctoral studies . His first poetry collection, Deca u izlogu (Children On Display, 2015) was published as the first-place winning manuscript at the regional poetry event, Ratković’s Poetry Evenings, in Bijelo Polje, Montenegro. For this collection he received the most significant national award for young poets in Serbia, Branko’s Award, and the reviews of the book were published in renowned literary magazines in Serbia and Croatia. His second poetry collection Prelazno doba (A Transitional Age, 2017) was published by the publisher Treći Trg from Belgrade, after winning Treći Trg literary contest. His third poetry collection Varljiva istorija doma (Deceptive History of Home) was published in 2025 by Raštan izdavaštvo. His individual poems are translated into Greek, English, Hungarian, Russian, Romanian and Slovenian. He is represented in several anthologies of Serbian and Bosnian poetry both at home and abroad. He is the editor of an anthology of contemporary poetry from Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia named Meko tkivo (Soft tissue, 2015) which was published by the A-302 Club of the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, Croatia, and a co-editor (in collaboration with Dinko Kreho and Boris Postnikov) of the anthology of Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian war prose A fost odata o tara. Panprama prozei de razboi din tarile fostei Iugoslavii in collaboration (Once upon a time there was a country. A panorama of the war prose in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, Editura Paralela 45, Romania, 2018) . He authored book reviews for culture journal Prosvjeta and published few research papers in the fields of literature and film. From 2017 to 2021 he was an executive editor in the publishing house Treći Trg, and was a chief coordinator of the Belgrade Poetry and Book Festival in 2017 and 2018. From 2017 to present day he has been sitting on the jury of Rukopisi (Manuscripts), a longe-lived poetry and short story writing contest for young authors in Serbia, at Pančevo Literary Festival. As an editor and proofreader he collaborated with PPM Enklava and he is is the founder and editor-in-chief of the publishing house Raštan izdavaštvo (Rashtan Publishing). He is a member of the Serbian Literary Society and a high school literature teacher.
Deceptive History of Home – Srđan Gagić
At the heart of Srđan Gagić’s Deceptive History of Home lies the question of belonging – the fragile possibility of being somewhere and truly experiencing oneself as one who belongs. It is a book about the search for home, about the restless movement between departure and return, where every departure is already a kind of arrival, and every arrival, in turn, carries within it the seed of another departure.
Equally, it is a meditation on inheritance – on the transgenerational and metagenealogical traces of our parents that we carry in our gestures and being, as extensions of our mothers and fathers.
Gagić has written a collection that restores poetry to its essential place – in our world and in every other. It is both a hymn to hope and an act of faith in language itself, a striving toward those answers that stand beyond the ramparts and walls of a brutal, constricted, and unvarnished reality.
– Đorđe Krajišnik, Oslobođenje
One must note the skill with which Gagić achieves the collection’s double tonality – simultaneously tender and careful in its linguistic shaping, yet sharp and defiant in its moral urgency.
He writes of the wars of the 1990s, of historical revisionism, borders, genocide, hollow verse, exploitation, corruption, the systemic erosion of workers’ rights, patriarchal patterns, the exodus of youth, and streets filled with demonstrators.
His critical edge is also turned toward the performativity of contemporary poets who, on social media, perform quasi-concern for the ecological crisis, for genocide (in Palestine?) or (student?) protests. Gagić questions the meaning and ethics of empty verse – here and now – “while death, like a puppy, slips away from their metaphors,” and “in the sky above the Mediterranean / instead of verses, history writes evil.”
– Stanislava Paunović, Eckermann (online literary magazine)
The nearly decade-long gap that separates Deceptive History of Home, Gagić’s third poetry collection, from his first two, is the result of painstaking labor – on his own manuscripts and on those of others, through his many editorial roles.
His devotion to the literary text can be seen in the careful leitmotif connections between his books, as well as in the subtle revisions of poems that reappear across them.
Gagić’s poetry — unafraid to confront genocide and war, mass death and mass graves, capitalist exploitation, environmental catastrophe embodied in polluted air, and the post-transitional realities of shuttered factories replaced by secondhand markets and precarious jobs — stands out as authentic and indispensable: an unsentimental legend of hunger.
– Milica Ćuković, Polja, no. 552, March/April 2025
Gagić’s poetry is deeply marked by the early experience of wartime destruction through which his lyrical subjects have grown.
From this, in his first collection, he poses a problem as historical as it is literary – one that reaches at least back to the nineteenth century – which could be phrased as: Can bad fathers have good sons?
In this question we sense both an accusation and a call to responsibility toward those who have placed our damaged lives into our hands, depriving us of one possible future, yet also a demand to transcend the given state and to create a future nonetheless.
Gagić’s poetry thus treats history as the field of its own intervention. The stylization of his language revolves around an associative core tied to trauma – from which he imagines a world in which that trauma might no longer exist.
In his second collection, his expression becomes more intricate and his perception wider, yielding metaphors of wilderness that sublimate the distance between the lyrical subject and a problematic community. Yet each image bears within it a ghostly, dreamlike aura – a reminder that violence cannot simply be erased.
– Stevan Bradić, preface to Logical Rebellions (Laguna, 2022)
Although characterized by the depth of its poetic expression, emotional maturity, and the layered vividness of its imagery, Deceptive History of Home does not shy away from pressing social realities.
Gagić approaches them – unlike many contemporary authors – with thoughtfulness and restraint, deepening questions that were asked long ago.
– Ognjen Aksentijević
In Deceptive History of Home, Gagić’s voice spans both the breadth and the depth of time and space, revealing itself more than ever before, and engaging more powerfully than ever in the social sphere.
These are high-voltage poems, written by a consciousness both comprehensive and sensitized – at once childlike and ancient – and from that (apparent) contrast bursts a poetic force that is impossible to resist.
– Goran Čolakhodžić
Poetry
-
MOTHER TAKING A SHOWER / KAKO SE MAJKA KUPA
-
A FAREWELL / ISPRAĆAJ
-
THE WORD / REČ
-
RECYCLING / RECIKLAŽA
-
BREAD / HLEB
-
SPRING / PROLEĆE
-
SEEDS / SEME
-
MIGRATION / MIGRACIJA
-
TWOSOME / DVOJE
-
CITY / GRAD
