Mesa Selimovic

The next novel, Tvrđava (The Fortress, 1970), placed still further in the past, is slightly more optimistic, and fulfilled with faith in love, unlike the lonely contemplations and fear in Death and the Dervish. The Fortress and Death and the Dervish are the only novels of Selimović that have thus far been translated into English. Subsequent novels Ostrvo (The Island, 1974), featuring an elderly couple facing aging and eventual death on a Dalmatian island, and posthumously published Krug (The Circle, 1983), have not been translated into English.

However, his novel Death and the Dervish (Derviš i smrt, 1966) was widely received as a masterpiece. The plot of the novel takes place in 18th-century Sarajevo under Ottoman rule, and reflects Selimović's own torment of the execution of his brother; the story speaks of the futility of one man's resistance against a repressive system, and the change that takes place within that man after he becomes a part of that very system. Some critics have likened this novel to Kafka's The Trial. It has been translated into many languages, including English, Russian, German, French, Italian, Turkish and Arabic. Each chapter of the novel opens with a Qur'an citation, the first being: "In the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful."

He was a writer and actor, known for Noci i jutra (1959), Das Haus an der Küste (1954) and Dervis i smrt (1974). He was married to Danka Selimovic and Mila Selimovic.

Selimović began writing fairly late in his life. His first short story (Pjesma u oluji / A song in the storm) was published in 1948, when he was thirty-six. His first book, a collection of short stories Prva četa (The First Company) was published in 1950 when he was forty. His subsequent work, Tišine (Silences) was published eleven years later in 1961. The following books Tuđa zemlja (Foreign land, 1962) and Magla i mjesečina (Mist and Moonlight, 1965) did not receive widespread recognition either.

After the war, he briefly resided in Belgrade, and in 1947 he moved to Sarajevo, where he was the professor of High School of Pedagogy and Faculty of Philology, art director of Bosna Film, chief of the drama section of the National Theater, and chief editor of the publishing house Svjetlost. Exasperated by a latent conflict with several local politicians and intellectuals, in 1971 he moved to Belgrade, where he lived until his death in 1982. In his 1976 letter to the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts, Selimović stated for the historical record that he regarded himself as a Serb and belonging to the corpus of Serbian literature. In his autobiography, Sjećanja, Selimović states that his paternal ancestry is from the Orthodox Christian Vujović brotherhood of the Drobnjak clan, his ancestor having converted to Islam in the 17th century for pragmatic reasons, given the presence of the Muslim Ottoman Empire in the area at the time. Selimović was a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Mesa Selimovic was born on April 26, 1910 in Tuzla, Austria-Hungary as Mehmed Selimovic.