Time Gifts
Runner-up for the 1998 NIN Award
Publishers in English: Polaris (1998), Northwestern University Press (US, 2000), PS Publishing (UK, 2006, as part of the mega-collection Impossible Stories).
A mysterious visitor comes to see three desperate human beings: an astronomer in his prison cell the night before his execution for the ultimate heresy; a paleolinguist with a wasted life behind her who has been forgotten by everybody in her dusty basement office; an old watchmaker with a dark, painful spot in his past that has haunted him for decades. The visitor has a unique but ambiguous time-gift for each one of them. His true identity is only known by an insane artist locked up in her asylum atelier. But who would believe an artist in this world, even if she were not insane?
Polaris Cover below.

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Zoran Zivkovic
Zoran Živković (born 1948) is a writer, essayist, researcher, publisher and translator. He was born in Belgrad, Serbia. His writing belongs to the middle European fantastika tradition, and shares much in common with such masters as Mikhail Bulgakov, Franz Kafka and Stanislaw Lem.
Zoran Živković graduated in literary theory from the Department of General Literature of the University of Belgrade in 1973. In 2000 his engagement in SF and in literary studies discontinued, and turned entirely to writing prose.
In 2007 he was appointed professor in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade where he now teaches Creative Writing.

