Winner of the European Union Prize for Literature. This collection of sixteen stories takes us on an eccentric tour of contemporary existence. A lonely man rants about everything under the sun, including the sun itself. A vampire recounts the history and travails of the Balkans’ bloodsucking community. A grief-stricken widower leads his son on a frantic search through the night. A husband and his pregnant wife argue, in Raymond Carver-like fashion, over whether Carver’s stories will have a negative influence on the baby. In prose rich with Nabokovian detail and barroom humor, Spahić paints a portrait of a world so strange, it could only exist in the twenty-first century.

Prizes

Winner of European Union Prize for Literature 2014

"[Head Full of Joy] presents a corpus of 16 unusual tales featuring episodes from the life of each story's hero. Each story is told by an omniscient narrator or the hero himself, and they paint a picture showing the collision of the outer and inner world of modern man, providing a distinct interpretation of the universal values of life." * Citation for the European Union Prize for Literature *

Ognjen Spahić is a Montenegrin writer who has published two collections of short stories and a novel about the end of reality, entitled Hansen’s Children, which won the 2005 Meša Selimović Prize. Head Full of Joy was awarded the 2014 European Union Prize for Literature.