Book edited by Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason awarded by ESCL/SELC

Great Immortality, a collection of essays on European cultural sainthood edited by Marijan Dović (ZRC SAZU) and Jón Karl Helgason (University of Iceland), has received the inaugural ESCL Excellence Award for Collaborative Research.

On 17 September 2021, the European Society for Comparative Literature organised a virtual roundtable to introduce the finalists and announce the winner of the ESCL Excellence Award for Collaborative Research. The prize, awarded for the first time, aims to encourage the production of ambitious collective monographs and to acknowledge the often underestimated role of editors. Nineteen books from different parts of the world competed for the first ESCL Excellence Award, of which four made it to the final round. In the end, an international jury recognised Great Immortality as the winner.

Work on Great Immortality, which was published in 2019 by Brill, was supported, among other sources, by ‘National Poets and Cultural Saints of Europe’, a research project led by Dović and funded by the Slovenian Research Agency.