Miloš Crnjanski

Born in 1893 in Csongrád to a Serbian family from Vojvodina, then part of Austria-Hungary, Crnjanski was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War and wounded fighting on the Galician front, a loyalty turned against his own origins that shaped his lifelong preoccupation with displacement.

He became a leading voice of interwar Yugoslav literary modernism, and in the 1930s served as a diplomat and journalist for the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in Berlin and Rome, a posting that put him in uncomfortably close proximity to fascism and left a controversial mark on his political reputation. Migrations, following Serbian soldiers conscripted into Habsburg service across the eighteenth century, appeared in 1929 as his major early novel.

He fled to London after the German invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 and spent nearly a quarter century there in genuine poverty, working ordinary jobs while continuing to write in near-total obscurity, before returning to Communist Yugoslavia in 1965. He died in Belgrade in 1977.