Ivo Andrić

The only Serbian Nobel Prize Winner, an author Ivo Andrić, was a true cosmopolitan – a citizen of the world. He was born in 1892 in Austro-Hungary, in Travnik, Bosnia. He spent his childhood in Višegrad and Sarajevo, went to universities of Zagreb, Cracow (Poland), Vienna and Graz (Austria).  He was in the diplomatic service of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and among other offices, he a Yugoslav ambassador to Germany, stationed in Berlin. When the Second World War started, he resigned. He spent the rest of his life in Belgrade, where he died in 1975. As a young man he was a member of a revolutionary national organisation ‘Young Bosnia’ (MladaBosna) and was arrested several times. He actively advocated for a Yugoslav concept. As a child of a mixed marriage, he first declared himself a Croat, but later on as a Serb.  At first he wrote in the ijekavian and later in the ekavian dialect version of Serbian language. Andrić’s work can be  divided into three phases – poetry writing in the first phase, short stories in the second, whereas the third phase, after the Second World War, features novels, for which he best known. In 1961, he was warded a Nobel Prize for Literature for his novel The Bridge on the Drina and all his written opus. His work is in the spirit of Realism, best describing  the realm of Bosnia, where Serbs, Turks, Croats, Jews all live alongside each other and where the influences of the Turkish East and European West meet. His books have been translated into many world languages, and today, as an author, he appropriated equally by the Croats and Bosnians.

ART

The books The Bridge on the DrinaTravnik (Bosnian) ChroniclesOmerPasha LatasMissDevil’s Yard, a short story, Signs by the Roadside, a collection of aphoristic notes, Ex Ponto, poetry in prose.