DOBRICA ĆOSIĆ - WRITER, ACADEMIC AND POLITICIAN

BIJELJINA, MAY 17 /SRNA/ - Serbian writer, academic, and politician Dobrica Ćosić /1921–2014/ passed away on May 18, 2014.

Ćosić was a Serbian novelist and essayist, political and national theorist, and a full member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He was also the first president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1993. Ćosić was called the "father of the nation," and he will be remembered for his novels, The Sun Is Far Away, The Roots, Divisions, Time of Death, Time of Evil, and Time of Power. Ćosić’s early prose works did not attract much attention from the critics, but he entered domestic and world literature in 1951 with his first work, The Sun Is Far Away. Because of his views on Kosovo and Metohija and the endangered position of Serbs, Ćosić left the Communist Party and remained a dissident until the end of his life. Dobrica Ćosić was the first recipient of the NIN Award in 1954 for his novel The Roots, and he won it a second time in 1961 for the trilogy Divisions. At the "Adligat" Association in Belgrade, of which Ćosić was a member, there is a collection containing more than 200 of his dedications, several manuscripts, and part of the books from the writer’s library.