Ivo Andrić
Personal Information
Description
Ivo Andrić (Serbian Cyrillic: Иво Андрић; born Ivan Andrić; 9 October 1892 – 13 March 1975) was a Yugoslav novelist, poet and short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961. His writings dealt mainly with life in his native Bosnia under Ottoman rule.
Books
Devil's yard
A Bosnian Franciscan, Fra Peter, is put in an Istanbul jail after being wrongly accused of plotting against Ottoman rule.
Omer Pasha Latas
A sweeping epic by Nobel Prize-winner Ivo Andrić about power, identity, and Islam set in 19th-century Ottoman Bosnia and Istanbul. This previously untranslated historical novel by the Nobel Prize-winner Andrić tells the story of Omer Pasha Latas, born Mihailo Latas, a Serbian Christian who rose to a position of power in the Ottoman Empire. When Mihailo's chances of a military career in Austria fail, he flees across the border into Ottoman Bosnia, converts to Islam, and makes his way to Istanbul where his exceptional intelligence and qualities as a potential military leader are recognized by the sultan. Having distinguished himself in mercilessly suppressing uprisings in Albania, Syria, and Kurdistan, and subsequently in Montenegro, Herzegovina, and Albania, Omer Pasha is sent to Bosnia in 1850 to quell resistance by local landowners to modernizing reforms. Now in the land of his fathers, Omer Pasha's display and misuse of power is all the more urgent but also more complex. Along with an exquisitely drawn array of local characters, Ivo Andrić portrays a man who is both supremely arrogant and pitifully vulnerable, and a city in the grip of fear.
Travnička hronika
Andric's sweeping novel The Days of the Consuls spans the seven years 1807-1814, when French and Austrian consuls served alongside the Turkish Viziers in the remote Bosnian town of Travnik, distant outpost of the Ottoman Empire. Divided as the community is, Muslims, Cahtolic and Orthodox Christians, Jews and Gypsies all unite in a common contempt for their visitors. Isolated in a claustrophobic atmosphere of suspicion and mutual distrust, the consuls and Viziers vie with each other, following the fluctuations of their respective foreign policies. When international politics permit however, they console each other as best they can in this harsh and hostile land. Andric uses his native Bosnia as a microcosm of human society, stressing its potential for national, cultural and religious misunderstanding and conflict, and identifying the barriers of all kinds that hinder communication between individuals. Written against the, background of violence released in these mixed communities during the Second World War, the novel has poignant relevance.