Culture

Years with Andrić and Years without Him

Ivo Andrić, the most well known writer of the former Yugoslavia, passed away thirty one years ago, and sixty one years ago published his novel "The Bridge on the River Drina", for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

If we add two re-printed and recently published titles - a book of interviews and Ivo Andrić's doctoral dissertation edited by Prof. Radovan Vučković, a prominent authority on his life and work, we have reason enough to remember this writer, especially following the bloody war in the dark Bosnian town in which his most famous novel was set. After the abyss and civil war that tore the region asunder, it is instructive and restorative to read Andrić, a writer who used prose to build bridges between cultures separated by conflicts, convictions and religions.