Hvar City Theatre Days, Vol. 52 No. 1, 2026.
Original scientific paper
The Dialogue of (In)sufficent Words and Drawings: Poems and Drawings in the Collections of Sonja Manojlović and Saša Šekoranja
Helena Peričić Herenda
Abstract
The poetry of Sonja Manojlović (born 1948) has been included in numerous anthologies
published at home and abroad. In 2016, Manojlović was awarded the Goran Wreath; she has also won many international prizes for poetic excellence (including at poetry meets and festivals in Japan, India, Russia and Greece). She is the author of more than fifteen collections of poems.The following collections were published in collaboration with academy-trained painter and illustrator Saša Šekoranja (born 1973): Meet Lilith
(2002,2003); Poems and Drawings (2008); I Shall Travel to the Sea with Six Labradors
(2012); Give a Title (2013); Good for All (2015); Looking at Answers (2018) and Jokes
and Warnings (2022). The present writer will endeavour to put forward her own view
of the verses of Sonja Manojlović in the collections in which they appear yoked to the
drawings of Šekoranja, and indicate just how in this creative poetic and visual symbiosis
the poet and the artist/illustrator in words and drawings offer a striking verbal and visual
intermedial enterprise that constitutes a layered and effective outcome of the blending of
two artistic identities that interpenetrate each other between the covers of the same book,
complementing as well as underlining the individuality of one with the help of the other.
The concision, parsimony and starkness of the lyrical writings of Sonja Manojlović, paired
with her belief in the »insufficiency« of words and the deficiencies of human non-verbal
communication are thus supplemented and highlighted by the rudimentary, stylised and
practically infantilised Šekoranja’s illustrations, on which the words of the poet rely and
which they reflect with a kind of linguistic asceticism.
Keywords
Sonja Manojlović; poetry; Saša Šekoranja; illustrations; the (in)sufficiency of the verbal; the visual
Hrčak ID:
347171
URI
Publication date:
6.5.2026.
Visits: 0 *