GoceSmilevski
Novels about the people history left out — Spinoza's silence, Freud's youngest sister, Héloïse's own account of her life.
Novels translated into 37 languages, winner of the European Union Prize for Literature. Co-writer of Mother, which opened the Orizzonti section at Venice in 2025.
Film
Mother
Calcutta, August 1948. Seven days in which Teresa waits for permission to leave her convent and found an order of her own — and discovers what her ambition costs the women around her.
- Screenplay
- Goce Smilevski, Teona Strugar Mitevska, Elma Tataragić
- Director
- Teona Strugar Mitevska
- Cast
- Noomi Rapace, Sylvia Hoeks, Nikola Ristanovski
- Premiere
- Opening film, Orizzonti, 82nd Venice Film Festival, 27 August 2025
Praise
“Stunning . . . Bold and unexpected . . . It dares to provide a kind of shadow biography of Freud that is highly critical of the ‘great man.’ . . . Sure to be provocative.”
Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books
“Hauntingly beautiful . . . Achingly elegant . . . This is a novel that deserves to belong to world literature.”
Judges’ citation, Modern Language Association’s Lois Roth Award (honorable mention)
“Strong, multi-layered, obsessive [like] José Saramago.”
La Repubblica, Italy
“Like Tolstoy, Smilevski chooses to use simple words, but to connect them eloquently so that they build to create powerful and complex images, ideas and feelings. . . . [A] heart-breaking book.”
Nicholas Meyer
“I’ve been deeply moved. . . . It’s very difficult to forget and is very likely to be as controversial as it is acclaimed.”
Joyce Carol Oates, Elle, Spain
“This gem of a book . . . is deeply moving. . . . A provocative discourse on sanity and perception . . . Unforgettable.”
Publishers Weekly
“A brooding, sepulchral book.”
The Wall Street Journal
“Powerful . . . a discovery.”
RaiNews, Italy — No. 1 Book of the Year
“Superb . . . Provocative and poignant . . . A sensitive portrayal and a well-crafted novel [that] offers keen insight into the Freud family dynamics.”
Kirkus Reviews
“A pleasure to read. There is great depth in this novel, and its poetic prose shines through even in this English translation.”
Associated Press
Books
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Freud's Sister
Vienna, 1938. Freud is granted an exit visa and permitted to name the people who will leave with him. His sister Adolfina is not on the list. Written over seven years, the novel gives a life and a voice to a woman known to history in a handful of facts.
European Union Prize for Literature · Premio per la Cultura Mediterranea · Central European Initiative Award for Literature.
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Conversation with Spinoza
A life addressed in the second person to the philosopher who took care to leave nothing personal behind — the excommunication, the lens grinding, the body that went on wanting things the mind had ruled out.
Novel of the Year, Utrinski vesnik.
About
Goce Smilevski was born in Skopje in 1975. He studied at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, at Charles University in Prague and at Central European University in Budapest.
He is the author of four novels, published in 37 languages. His work has received the European Union Prize for Literature, the Central European Initiative Award for Literature and the Premio per la Cultura Mediterranea. For his plays he has been awarded the Chernodrinski Award and the Austrian PEN Club Award for New Play. He is a member of the European Film Academy.
His novels return, again and again, to people who appear in the historical record only at the edge of someone else's life — and ask what that life looked like from the inside.