Name Miodrag Kojadinovic | Role Poet | |
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Miodrag Kojadinović (Serbian Cyrillic: Миодраг Којадиновић, [mǐodraɡ kojadǐːnoʋit͡ɕ], born 1961) is a Canadian-Serbian linguist, interpreter, translator, writer, anthropologist, and theoretician of gender and sexuality.
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Academic involvement
He completed his academic education in Canada, Serbia, and Hungary, worked in three embassies (transferring to the Canadian Embassy to Belgrade when James Bissett was ambassador there), in the media in Canada and the Netherlands, carried out research at Utrecht University, the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and, under the mentorship of Eduardo P. Archetti, at Oslo University. Since 2005 he has been teaching in the People’s Republic of China, where he also uses an unofficial Chinese version of his name: 妙谠 (simplified Mandarin; in pinyin: Miào Dǎng; lit. "Merciful Counsel" or "Generous Advice"), first at Guangxi University in Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, then at a colégio in Macau, and since 2012 at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong Province.
Writing
Miodrag Kojadinović is a polyglot and writes in English, Serbian, Dutch, and French and speaks two dozen other European and Asian languages.
He is best at short forms, focusing on short stories about localities, e.g. Macau, in a collection by global lusophone and China-based authors (published in three identical books in Chinese, Portuguese, and English) where he won the 1st prize in English, the Savamala old district of Belgrade (in Serbian), Shanghai (in English), or Pamplona (in Serbian), travellogues on Venice, Manila, Malacca, Vietnam, etc., and especially poetry (including short forms such as haiku, e.g. in Chiaroscuro for Ars Poetica). His collection of eight tales about China, Under Thunderous Skies, has Nanning, Shanghai, Macau, Hong Kong and Guangzhou as locations of the events. He has also published erotica and academic writing.
His work has appeared in the US, Serbia (in Serbian and Hungarian), Canada, Russia, the Netherlands (in Dutch, Frisian, and English), Slovenia, Spain, India, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, France, Israel, Montenegro, Scotland, England, Austria, Germany, Australia, and Croatia.
He has also edited the first GLBT studies reader in Serbian (Čitanka istopolnih studija, 2001), the first major work on queer and gender non-standard issues in Belgrade (next collection of papers with the same topic was published only in 2009, referencing Čitanka). Even though in his own writings Miodrag Kojadinović rejects social (de)constructivism of the 1990s and defends the idea of an essentialist Queer identity throughout history, the Reader contains both sides of the discourse, allowing the Serbian public to explore the concepts in Serbian for the first time.
Other media
His nomadic life between continents/countries is the topic of the documentary Double Exit (director Kim Meijer's graduation work for her MA course at the Utrecht School of the Arts), shown at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) as a part of an omnibus by the students graduating in Media Production in 1996, as well as at events in Budapest and Belgrade.
His photography has also appeared in print and on the Internet.