THE VELVET SHROUD - winner of the Stale Popov Award
The last novel of Olivera Nikolova published by Matica Makedonska is the winner of the Stale Popov Award, given by the Writers Association of Macedonia for the year 2015.
"The Velvet Shroud" is provocative, courageous, incredibly exciting, playful beyond limits, masterfully written and "awkwardly"/unusually structured prose, which, from a point of genre could be best qualified as "novel-in progress". Umberto Eco would say: open work. Macedonian literature has not yet produced prose of this radical genre, prose whose superior narrative succeeds to play exactly with the most important: with the cursed and fundamental aesthetic fraction fiction/faction. In this "open novel" its faction, represented by the main characters - eight historically and juridically authentic "women-murderers" who lived and killed between the 17th and the 21 st century, is the least relevant. The only relevant is its "fictionality", the seductive imagination of its writer who created this mesmerizing LITERARY ARTWORK. With this book, Olivera Nikolova, author of more than twenty books, winner of a number of most prestigious awards, a lady in her best years, a woman of integrity, a writer with a name and high profile, once again confirms her understandable status of La Grande Dame of Macedonian literature.
(The jury of the 2015 Stale Popov Award - Jelena Luzhina, Blazhe Minevski and Ivan Chapovski)