The "Petar Mandic" Endowment, a charitable institution, based in Belgrade, which preserves the memory of Nikola Tesla's ancestors and popularizes family values and parenting in our society, in cooperation with the High School in Nova Varos is organizing the first literary competition for the newly-established "Professor Borivoje Jelic" award.

The competition's aim and propositions

The competition's aim is to, through students’ submissions, affirm family values and parenting in Serbia, especially in Nova Varos. The students will write in their chosen form (a poem, a story, an essay etc). The submissions need to be written in Cyrillic and signed with a code before submitting.

The best three entries will be awarded with the prize of 10.000 dinars each, which will be paid into a bank account of the award winners. The authors of the best entries will also be personally handed a luxury edition of the book Tesla: Duhovni lik (Tesla: The Spiritual Character), with the inscription by the author.

The competition will take place at the High School in Nova Varos on March 31st 2023, at 1.15 p.m. The set topic will be taken from a sealed envelope on the day of the competition, in front of the jury invigilating the competition. The competition is set to last 90 minutes, or the equivalent of two school lessons.

Marking the entries will be done by an independent expert jury from Belgrade, whose members’ names will be revealed during the proclamation of the award winners. Each jury member will choose the three best entries in their personal opinion, independently of the other two. In case there is not enough agreement between the jury members on the awarded entries, or in case their choices exceed the number of awards, for the final decision between entries which receive the same number of votes a referring member of the Expert Council of the "Petar Mandic" Endowmen will be consulted.

The announcement of the best students' entries will be on April 10th 2023, on the birth date of Professor Borivoje Jelic. After deciphering the authors' names, the awarded entries will be published on the official internet presentation of the "Petar Mandic" Endowment at teslamandic.org.

We wish you plenty of inspiration in the forthcoming competition.