Profile of Bora Cosic

Bora Cosic is a Croatian Author, born 1932 in Zagreb. In 1937 he moved to Belgrade to study philosophy. During the 1950’s he worked as an editor for various journals and translated from Russian. His first novel, Kuca lopova ( House of Thieves), a surrealist confrontation with social reality in Yugoslavia, was published in 1956. Soon his name was on the blacklist which the state cultural authorities used to discourage national publishing houses from printing the works of certain authors. The stage version of his satirical novel, Uloga moje porodice u svetskoj revoluciji (My Family’s Role in the World Revolution, 1997), written in 1969, was banned for many years.

In 1992 Cosic left Belgrade in protest against the policies of the Serbian regime and settled in Rovinj, Istria. During his exile in Croatia, his country’s declared enemy, he wrote Dnevnik apatrida, in 1993, which is filled with reflections on Proust and the Franco-Prussian War. Cosic came to Berlin on a DAAD grant in 1995, and still lives here today. In 1999, when Nato troops were deployed in Kosovo, Cosic demanded liberation for the Albanians as well as for the Serbs from Milosevic and “from themselves“, i.e., from “ethnic madness“. Cosic has written more than thirty books, which have been translated into many European languages. His new novel Nulta Zemlja (The Country Zero) appeared in German translation in 2004.

• Weblinks
• Interview, Bosnia Report
• Interview, "Ich bin ein Relikt", 3sat (german)
• Reviews "Die Zollerklärung", Perlentaucher (german)