Gojko Čelebić: interview by Ana Maria Haddad Baptista and Márcia Fusaro

He was born in 1958 in the capital of Montenegro, Podgorica. He studied Ancient Greek at Charles University in Prague (founded in 1348) and graduated from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts. His teachers were the best Czech pedagogues, and he was influenced by his “teacher and friend”, the world-renowned storyteller Bohumil Hrabal, as well as the anti-communist dissidents among whom he was formed. He has published 80 books, plays and screenplays and has tried his hand at all genres. He is a novelist (13 novels) and a storyteller (15 collections of short stories) by vocation, but he has also published dozens of books of essays, scientific prose, poetry and theoretical, or literary-historical works. In his stage work, he is dedicated to theater and film (he is the author of seven feature films). He was the Minister of Culture of Montenegro (1993-97) and later an ambassador, or high-ranking diplomat, in ten countries, where he represented first the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, then the common state of Serbia and Montenegro, and finally his native Montenegro. He translates literary and theatrical works from six foreign languages. He lives in Montenegro and Prague. In recent years, he has been working on the anthology Poetry of Brazil 1525-2025, with 87 Brazilian poets from all eras that he has selected, translated into Serbian and wrote a critical apparatus for this anthology, which will soon be published in 700 pages in large format. Two of his books have been translated into Portuguese: Writers of Jewish Prague (a comprehensive 432-page study on Jewish writers in Prague such as Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Franz Werfel and others), and the prose Novel about Paris, thanks to the efforts of a professor at the University of São Paulo and translator Ana Maria Haddad. His last seven books, since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, have been published under the pseudonym Ben Golosovker. Full interview, access