Biography Essay

Danilo Kis is the most important writer to emerge in Serbia and Yugoslavia since the 1960s. After Ivo Andric and Milos Crnjanski, Kis can be regarded as the most important Serbian writer of the twentieth century within the modernist and postmodernist orientation. The publication of his politically controversial novel Grobnica za Borisa Davidovica (1976; translated as A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, 1978) and the resulting scandal in Serbian and Yugoslav public life left a permanent mark on the literary establishment and decisively influenced younger authors who began writing in the mid 1970s. The work of Kis has also gained recognition outside of Yugoslavia, making him one of the most important writers of East-Central Europe alongside Milan Kundera, Gyorgy Konrad, and Czeslaw Milosz.

Kis was born on 22 February 1935 in the town of Subotica, a Serbian province of Vojvodina, near the Yugoslav-Hungarian border. His father, Eduard, a Hungarian Jew, was...