Ivo Andrić

Ivo Andrić was born in 1892 in Dolac, near Travnik, in Bosnia, then under Austro-Hungarian administration, to a Catholic family of modest means. His father died when he was two, and he was raised by relatives in Višegrad, the small town on the Drina whose Ottoman bridge would become the centre of his most famous book. As a student in Sarajevo, Zagreb, Vienna and Kraków he joined the revolutionary youth movement Young Bosnia; after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 he was arrested and spent much of the First World War imprisoned or confined. His meditative prose poems Ex Ponto came out of that ordeal.

After the war he earned a doctorate at Graz and entered the diplomatic service of the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia, rising to become ambassador in Berlin from 1939 until the German invasion of 1941. He spent the occupation in Belgrade in near seclusion, declining to publish, and wrote the three novels that appeared in 1945: The Bridge on the Drina, Bosnian Chronicle and The Woman from Sarajevo. Drawing on the history of Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Bosnia, he depicted a land where Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Jews lived side by side, bound by custom and divided by fear. His narration is calm, ironic and unhurried, built from legends, chronicles and the destinies of ordinary people. The novella The Damned Yard (1954) distilled his vision into a tale of prisoners and storytelling.

Under communist Yugoslavia Andrić held a number of honorary posts. The Nobel Prize of 1961 made him the only Yugoslav literary laureate. He died in Belgrade in 1975. His legacy is claimed, and contested, by the Serb, Croat and Bosniak traditions alike.