Prokopiev’s shape-shifting stories remain adamantly, radically open for us to interpret. They challenge us to accept, even to embrace, our own confusion: implying, perhaps, that life itself is as confusing as any fable.
Biography
Aleksandar Prokopiev (1953, Skopje) is Macedonian storywriter, essayist and poet. He also writes screenplays for film, theatre, TV shows, radio dramas, comic books and animated films. Earned his MA and PhD at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade at the department of Comparative Literature and Theory of Literature and he worked as scientific researcher and professor at the Institute of Macedonian Literature at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje.
In 2000, Encyclopaedia Britannica highlighted his hybrid prose book “Anti-Instructions for Personal Use” among the most interesting annual publications from South-East Europe. In 2011 Prokopiev won the prestigious international award “Balkanika” for the collection of fairy tales for adults “Homunculus: Fairy Tales from the Left Pocket”. In 2022, in the latest edition of the extensive, renowned history of European literature “Les Lettres Europèennes”, his prose is analyzed in the chapter “Trends and contemporary figures 1989-2021”, comparing it with the narration of inventive storytellers, such as Barthelme and Calvino.
Prokopiev is the author of the following books: “The Young Master of the Game” (short stories, 1983), “…or..”. (short stories, 1986), “Sailing South” (short stories, 1987), “A Sermon on the Snake” (stories, 1992), “Voyages of Tale” (essays, 1996), “Let’s make a movie” (children’s picture book, 1997), “Ars amatoria” (stories, 1998), “Image which rolls” (haiku, 1998), “Was Callimachus a Postmodernist?” (essays, 1994), “Fairytale on the road” (essays, 1996), “Anti-Instructions for Personal Use” (poetical diary, 2000), “Postmodern Babylon” (essays, 2000), “The man with four watches” (short stories, 2003), “Borges and the computer” (essays, 2005), “The Peeper” (novella, 2007), “Homunculus: Fairy Tales from the Left Pocket” (stories, 2011), “Horazzio Cvikalo” (stories, 2013), “Simeon and Ivec” (flesh drama, 2014), “Birds and Cats” (haiku , 2015), “The Son – Fish” (short stories, 2017), “The Dolphin” (short stories, 2018), “222 Anti-Instructions for Personal Use” (short stories, 2019), “Love Amateurs” (short stories, 2021), “The dance of the colorful handkerchiefs” (children’s picture book, 2022), “Tribune, Chronysteric, Nomad” (essays, 2023), “Haiku from Skopje” (haiku, 2023).
Outstanding title:
HOMUNCULUS (2011)
“Homunculus” is a collection of sixteen adult fairy tales in which Prokopiev combines the erotic, tragic, absurd, and humorous. The tales in “Homunculus” challenge our perceptions of reality. They transcend the sugar-sweet endings we normally associate with fairy tales while retaining elements of the magical and unexpected. The reader is drawn through the familiar and the unknown: guided through subverted fairytales known to most Europeans such as Tom Thumb and Snow White, others that have their roots in Macedonian folklore, and tales straight from the head of Prokopiev himself. Humorous, skillful and unexpected, each story contains at its very core a love of life.
No. of pp: 144
Rights sold to:
Poland (“Wydawnictwo Toczka”), Croatia (“Fraktura”), England (“Istros Books”), Italy (“Salento books”), Albania (“Fan Noli”), Bulgaria (“Knigi za vsichki”), Serbia (“Geopoetika”), Turkiye (“Pinhan”), Egypt (“Al arabi”).
Latest title:
TRIBUNE, CHRONYSTERIC, NOMAD (2025)
All eleven essays from this book are focused on a single theme: the fate of “authorship as such”, the fatalism of the very choice of this destiny (to be/remain a writer at any cost…), the fatalism of the innumerable variants of this choice (the variants that are continuously confirmed as “unfortunate” or “misunderstood”!), the eternal author’s insecurity/distrust about/because of what was written (personal and “objective”…), the daily doubt (first of all in oneself…)… Special book of Prokopievian stature, written with the heavy but also angelically casual author’s hand, full of sumptuous cascades of sentences and paced in the bravura tempo of andante con brio.
No. of pp: 157
Rights:
Ars Lamina – Publications
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