Ivo Andrić
1892 – 1975 · Bosnia and Herzegovina
Known for: Nobel laureate in literature, author of The Bridge on the Drina
“A storyteller of bridges, and of the people who lived between their banks.”
Biography
Ivo Andrić was born in October 1892 in the village of Dolac near Travnik, in the Bosnia then administered by Austria-Hungary, into a poor Catholic family. His father, a silversmith reduced to working as a school janitor, died of tuberculosis when the boy was two, and his widowed mother placed him with relatives in Višegrad. He grew up beside the Drina and the great Ottoman bridge of Mehmed Paša Sokolović, in a town where Orthodox, Muslim, Catholic and Jewish lives ran side by side, and he later called it his real home. A scholarship from the Croatian cultural society Napredak took him at ten to the gymnasium in Sarajevo, where he struggled with mathematics, excelled in Latin, Greek and German, and joined the South Slav youth movement. After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 the Austro-Hungarian police arrested him; no case could be built against him, and he passed most of the war in prison and internment until the amnesty of July 1917.
The confinement made him a writer: his first book, a volume of lyrical prose drawn from those years, appeared in 1918. He then studied South Slav history and literature in Zagreb and in Graz, where he took his doctorate in 1924, and spent two decades in the diplomatic service of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, ending as ambassador in Berlin from 1939 until the German invasion of April 1941. He returned to occupied Belgrade and lived out the war quietly in a friend's apartment, writing with no prospect of publication. Out of that seclusion came Bosnian Chronicle, The Woman from Sarajevo and above all The Bridge on the Drina, which follows the bridge of his childhood across four centuries and lets generation after generation of townspeople cross it, Ottoman and Austrian, Muslim, Serb, Jew and Croat, until the first shells of 1914 fall.
After the war he held ceremonial posts in communist Yugoslavia and was widely honoured at home. In 1961 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, citing the epic force with which he had traced human destinies drawn from the history of his country, and he gave the prize money for the building of libraries in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Translations followed, and readers far from the Drina found his books. His health failed in late 1974 and he died in Belgrade on 13 March 1975. The Belgrade flat in which he had written through the occupation became a museum, and he remains the only writer from Yugoslavia to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature.