Zlatko Krasni

Zlatko Krasni (Template:Lang-sr, b. in 1951 in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia) is a Serbian poet who currently resides in Belgrade. Krasni been an active organizer of poet's conferences in the former Yugoslavia for three decades and is one of the figures everyone knows at Belgrade and elsewhere as a literary middleman both in his own country and abroad.

Zlatko Krasni has published nine books of poetry, the most recent of which is called 'The Black Angel. His poetry reflects the vulnerability of the individual in any society, but specifically the situation of a person unwilling to emigrate under external threats; this is reflected somewhat unfortunately in a poem quoted by defenders of the former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic's admirers in Serbia [1]. In judging this poem, the devastating effect of the Kosovo War and especially the 1999 NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on the psyche of civilian victims like Krasni and of Serbians in general must be taken into account. Krasni's work has garnered him various awards, including the prize of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts which does, of course, place him in a somewhat akward context within the Serbian civil society which is not at all close to the Academy's predominantly nationalist positions [2]. Recently, however, Krasni has obtained the prestigious residence grant of the Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung and was a guest at the Literarisches Colloquium at Berlin in 2005 [3], both institutions which would have avoided to honour him if his political character had been at all doubtful.

Krasni has held the chair of German at the Foreign Languages Department at the University of Belgrade [4]. Apart from his role as a poet, he works a critic and translator and is the editor of several anthologies of German poetry. He has translated about 30 books by several German authors into Serbian.