Bora Ćosić, was born in 1932 in Zagreb, and moved to Belgrade with his family in 1937. There he finished high school at the First Men's Gymnasium, then studied at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade. In his youth, he translated Russian futuristic poets, edited the newspaper Mlada kultura in 1952, the magazine Danas in 1961–1963, and the magazine Rok in 1969–1970. He worked as a playwright and artistic advisor in the film companies "Slavija", 1958–1959, and "Avala", 1962–1963. He collaborated on documentaries, wrote dialogue for feature films. During his stay in Europe, in addition to complete books, he published hundreds of texts in newspapers and magazines in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Poland and Albania. He has participated in more than two hundred readings in several European countries. He has given more than a hundred interviews for various media, press, radio and television. He has participated in literary conferences, festivals, symposia, international meetings and congresses.[2] In 2017, he signed the Declaration on the Common Language of the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins.[3][4]
Literary opus
He began his career as a writer with the novel House of Thieves from 1956, and then published books of essays Visible and Invisible Man, 1962, Sodom and Gomorrah, 1963. He is the author of the cult novel of recent Serbian prose, The Role of My Family in the World Revolution, 1969, set in war and post-war Belgrade. At the same time, Ćosić is the legatee to the Central European prose tradition of intellectual essayism, as well as one of the last intellectuals who emotionally and sincerely identified with the Yugoslavia, with a mixture of elegiac and painful re-examination after its disintegration. A film of the same name was made based on that novel.
The disintegration of Yugoslavia took the writer into voluntary exile (most often in Rovinj and Berlin, while publishing in Croatia).[5] That part of his work is marked mainly by essays, among which the Diary of Stateless Persons, 1993, (again a play with fictitious identity through which he expresses views on contemporary socio-political reality), Good Governance, 1995, and Customs Declaration, 2000, a semi - autobiographical text soaked in reflections on Yugoslavia and the author 's mixed feelings about it. He has written about 50 books, published in Serbia, Croatia and Germany.[6]
Awards
1969: NIN Award, for novel Uloga moje porodice u svetskoj revoluciji.
