Milorad Pavić

Milorad Pavić (Serbian Cyrillic: Милорад Павић; 15 October 1929 – 30 November 2009) was a Serbian novelist, poet, short story writer, and literary historian. Born in Belgrade in 1929, he published a number of poems, short stories and novels during his lifetime, the most famous of which was the Dictionary of the Khazars (1984). Upon its release, it was hailed as "the first novel of the 21st century." Pavić's works have been translated into more than thirty languages. He was vastly popular in Europe and in South America, and was deemed "one of the most intriguing writers from the beginning of the 21st century." He won numerous prizes in Serbia and in the former Yugoslavia, and was mentioned several times as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in Belgrade in 2009. Milorad Pavić was born in Belgrade, Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 15 October 1929 to a distinguished family of intellectuals and writers "that has produced well-known writers for six generations, since the 18th century". He received a Bachelor of Arts in literature from the University of Belgrade, and later obtained a PhD in literary history at the University of Zagreb. Pavić entered the literary scene with two collections of poetry titled Palimpsests (Palimpsesti), and Moon Stone (Mesečev kamen), published in 1969 and 1971, respectively. Pavić's poems were soon translated into English, and included in the anthology titled Contemporary Yugoslav Poems. Soon after, Pavić dedicated himself to wri…