Danilo Kiš (1935–1989)

Danilo Kiš was born in Subotica, Yugoslavia (present-day Serbia). His father Eduard Kiš was a Hungarian Jewish railway inspector and his mother Milica, née Dragićević, was a Serbian Orthodox Christian. He also had a sister, Danica.

Kiš's father was often absent during his childhood and spent time in a psychiatric hospital in Belgrade in 1934 and again in 1939. Between hospital stays, Eduard Kiš edited the 1938 edition of the Yugoslav National and International Travel Guide, and young Danilo saw his father as a traveler and a writer.
In the late 1930s, Kiš's parents became concerned with the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe and had three-year-old Danilo baptized into the Eastern Orthodox Church. Kiš later said he believed this action saved his life during World War II. In January 1942, an occupying force of Hungarian troops allied with Nazi Germany invaded Novi Sad, where the Kiš family resided, and massacred thousands of Serbs and Jews in their homes and around the city. Eduard Kiš was among a large group of people rounded up and taken to the banks of the Danube to be shot. He managed to escape and the family fled to Kerkabarabás, in southwest Hungary. There Danilo attended primary school. In mid-1944, the Hungarian authorities began large-scale roundups of Jews. Eduard Kiš was deported to the death camp at Auschwitz, where he was killed. Danilo, Danica, and Milica Kiš were spared, perhaps owing to Danilo and Danica's baptism certificates.

Eduard Kiš's murder would have a major impact on his son's writing.
Many of his works blended fact and fiction to describe the horrors of the Holocaust. After the war ended, the family moved to Cetinje, Yugoslavia. Kiš studied literature at the University of Belgrade and in 1958 was the first student there to be awarded a degree in comparative literature. He stayed on for two years of post-graduate research and started writing for Vidici magazine, where he worked until 1960. In 1962, he published his first two novels, Mansarda (translated as The Attic) and Psalm 44. He taught at the University of Strasbourg until 1973. During that period, he translated several classical French works into Serbo-Croatian. He also wrote and published Garden, Ashes (1965), Early Sorrows (1969), and Hourglass (1972).

In 1976, he published the short story collection A Tomb for Boris Davidovich after teaching at the University of Bordeaux in 1973-1974.

When he returned to Belgrade that year, he was accused of plagiarizing portions of the novel from other authors. He responded with a book-length essay called The Anatomy Lesson (1978).
The following year, Kiš moved to Paris, where he found an enthusiastic audience. He began to receive greater worldwide recognition as his works were translated into several languages and appeared in The New Yorker magazine. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in September 1989 and died a month later.
He was married to Mirjana Miočinović from 1962 to 1981; at the time of his death, he was living with Pascale Delpech.
Following Kiš's death, his close friend Susan Sontag edited and published Homo Poeticus, a compilation of his essays and interviews.