One of the most Serbian writers. His prose books have been awarded several times in the country and the world, adapted to the dramatic forms and received significant international critical reception. He has won the World Prize for fiction in 2003. He is a regular professor at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. He graduated in 1973, majoring in General Literature with the theory of literature at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade. At the same university he got a master's degree in 1979 and PhD in 1982.

Marko Ristic was the leader and chief ideologist of Serbian surrealism. He was born on June 20, 1902 in Belgrade, where he died on 20 July 1984. He was a Yugoslav ambassador in France from 1945 to 1948, and then President of the Commission for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. He was also a member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Federation Council.

He was buried in the Avenue of Honor at the New Cemetery in Belgrade.

Sima Lukin Lazic (Bosanski Brod, August 15, 1863 - Rajic, Slavonia, July 19, 1904) was a Serbian writer, journalist and writer. He was born in a merchant family. Because of the anti-Turkish activities his father fled to Serbia. Lazic has finished primary school in Sabac, ending the third year of high school  in Belgrade in 1876. Never finished high school, so he lived as an actor in a traveling family. From 1886 to 1889 he starred in Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad. He lived in Belgrade and Zagreb, publishing newspaper articles, national-political articles, popular historical, literary, humorous and satirical, pamphlet and other works in verse and prose. He has worked in many newspapers and magazines. He died on 19 July 1904 in Rajic in Slavonia.

Some of the main themes in his works are the relations between individuality and authority, life and death, and other existential problems.Selimović was born to a prominent Bosnian Muslim family on 26 April 1910 in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he graduated from elementary school and high school. In 1930, he enrolled to study the Serbo-Croatian language and literature at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philology and graduated in 1934. In 1936, he returned to Tuzla to teach in the gymnasium that today bears his name. He spent the first two years of World War II in the hometown Tuzla, where he was arrested for participation in the Partisan anti-fascist resistance movement in 1943. After the release, he moved to the liberated territory, became a member of Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the political commissar of Tuzla Detachment of the Partisans. During the war, Selimović's brother, also a communist, was executed by partisans' firing squad for alleged theft, without trial; Selimović's letter in defense of the brother was to no avail. That episode apparently affected Meša's later contemplative introduction to Death and the Dervish, where the main protagonist Ahmed Nurudin fails to rescue his imprisoned brother.

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 argued that despite his Muslim roots (he was a descendant of a notable bey family, he regarded himself as a Serb and a Serb writer. Selimović was a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Bećković was born in Senta, in the Serbian province of Vojvodina (then Danube Banate, Kingdom of Yugoslavia), to a family of Montenegrin Serbs. He graduated from the Valjevo Gymnasium in Valjevo in 1958. It was during his gymnasium years in Valjevo that he published his first poem, in the journal 'Mlada Kultura'. Furthermore, it was also in Valjevo that Bećković met Vera Pavladoljska, to whom the poem of the same name, published in 1960, was dedicated. This poem remains one of his most widely known and read poems. Beckovic went on to marry Pavladoljska, and he remained married to her until her death.

Upon graduating from the Valjevo gymnasium, he entered the University of Belgrade, graduating with a degree in Yugoslav and world literature. He became a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1983, becoming a full member in 1991. Bećković is a close friend of Serbian former Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica, and an active supporter of his Democratic Party of Serbia.

He lives in Belgrade since 1960. On the Montenegrin independence referendum, 2006, Bećković did not vote since he lives in Serbia. However, he, as the most prominent figure in the block against Montenegrin independence, gave passionate speeches against separation.A distinguishing feature of Bećković's poetry is its regionalism. Distinctly Serbian archaic dialect and phraseology permeate his work. This aspect of his work is most often lost when one reads it in translation. Even so, other features that distinguish Bećković's poetry in the cannon of South Slavic literature will not be lost on the foreign reader. Bećković's poetry often strikes the reader as profoundly rhetorical.

By the same stroke, he avoids the danger of didacticism that often comes hand in hand with the resort to rhetoric. He does so by insisting on the entertaing aspect of his poetry, regardlessly of the subject matter, ranging from love, over politics, to theology.

Precise details of the biography of Emanuila Janković until today are not known. 1758. is taken as the year of his birth and Novi Sad as the place of birth, though he himself later claimed that he was born in Serbia, in Belgrade. Emanuil finished school in Novi Sad. For further science Janković went to Germany at the University of Halle, where he enrolled in medical school. In 1789, he returns home with the intention to open the first Serbian printing company. He died very young, in 1791 in Subotica, on his way from Vienna in Novi Sad.

He devoted himself to writing poetry and to translating from European languages. He promoted the study of English (to balance the German predominance in the Balkans) and was among the first with Dr. Jovan Andrejević-Joles (1833–1864) to begin the systematic translation of Shakespeare into Serbian.Laza Kostić was born in Kovilj, Vojvodina (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) in 1841, of a military family. In his youth he was converted to the principles of social justice and Serbian independence in particular, and threw himself with great energy into political agitation. In 1864 he graduated from the Law School of the University of Budapest, and two years later he successfully defended his doctoral thesis in jurisprudence. After completing his studies, he occupied several positions and was very active in cultural and political life in Novi Sad, Belgrade, and Montenegro. He was among the leaders of Ujedinjena omladina srpska (United Serbian Youth) and was elected a Serbian representative to the Hungarian parliament, thanks to Svetozar Miletić, his mentor. Because of his liberal and nationalistic views he had to leave that Hungarian-occupied part of Serbia, but after several years in Belgrade and Montenegro he returned home. He died in Vienna in 1910. From 1869 to 1872 he was the president of Novi Sad's Court House, and virtually the leader of his party in his county; he was a delegate several times in the clerico-secular Sabor at Sremski Karlovci. He was Lord Mayor of Novi Sad twice, and also twice a Sajkasi delegate to the Parliament in Budapest.

After Svetozar Miletić and Jovan Jovanović Zmaj, perhaps the most active leader in Novi Sad was Laza Kostić, whose politics were some distance away from those of his associates but who was convinced that his mission to save Serbia through art had been baulked by obscuranist courtiers. In 1867, the Austrian Empire was transformed into Austria-Hungary, with the Kingdom of Hungary becoming one of two autonomous parts of the new state. This was followed by a policy of Hungarization of the non-Hungarian nationalities, most notably promotion of the Hungarian-language and suppression of Romanian and Slavic languages (including Serbian). As the chief defender of the United Serbian Youth movement, he was especially active in securing the repeal of certain unjust laws imposed on his and other nationalities in the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire. When Mihailo Obrenović III, Prince of Serbia, was assassinated, the Austro-Hungarian authorities (headed by Kalman Tisza) sought to falsely implicate Laza, his mentor Miletić, and other Serbian intellectuals in the murder plot. Though arrested and incarcerated, Kostić, like the rest of them, was eventually set free. The new Prince of Serbia was Milan IV Obrenović, a boy of fourteen who had fallen in love with Laza's most recent work—Maksim Crnojević—released that year (1868; though it was written five years earlier). Milan's great mission in life, he had already decided, was to save from a life of misery and suffering the poet whose work he and others adored. In 1872, Milan IV of Serbia was declared of age, and he took the government into his own hands. Almost Milan's first act as monarch was to send for Kostić, "that great Serbian poet and activist for Serbian rights in Austria-Hungary." At the time, Laza, back in Novi Sad after making a vitriolic speech against the Habsburgs at Milan's inauguration in Belgrade, was put back in prison by the same authorities as before. The accusations laid against him—high treason—came to naught and he was eventually freed. With more false accusations pending against him, Laza decided it was time to seek refuge in Belgrade.

Until 1895 Laza was left to live as best as he could. He was utterly convinced that he was in the world to write verse and prose and defend Serbian rights and that any other activity was a betrayal of his mission. Making his home in Belgrade, he became a popular figure there as a poet, but Serbia had other plans for him. In Belgrade, through Milan's influence Laza obtained the position of editor of Srpsku nezavisnost (Serbian Independence), an influential political and literary magazine. Milan, however, was careful to balance the Austrian and Russian parties in Serbia, with judicious leaning towards Austria-Hungary at first. At the end of the Russo-Turkish War, 1877–1878, Milan induced the Porte to acknowledge his country's independence at the Treaty of Berlin. Laza, let it be known, that he identified himself with the more moderate and opportunistic section of the Liberal party, decisively dissociating himself from the doctrine of a sudden and violent overthrow of society, and urging his associates to cooperate in bringing about a gradual development towards an independent state. In 1878 Milan chose him to be Jovan Ristić's principal assistant at the Congress of Berlin. In having Ristić as his chief adviser Milan was most fortunate, and but for that statesman's astounding diplomatic genius the liberation of Serbia would have been impossible. And in 1880 Kostić was sent to Petrovgrad as a member of the Serbian Legation there. The following years Milan devoted himself to his duties as a constitutional king with great conscientiousness by restoring the shattered finances of Serbia, reorganizing the army and modernizing the antiquated institutions of the young kingdom. But soon, Belgrade's opposition parties began taking issue with Kostić's writings. Laza Kostić had made Belgrade too hot to hold him. He had boasted of his power over the King in jest, but had disdain to make influential friends at court, so that King Milan in 1883, had to ask him to leave Belgrade for a time. Despite his great exaggerated bizarreness, Laza Kostić was ranked a great poet and writer just the same. Soon after, he took up residence in Cetinje, and the post of editor-in-chief of Glas Crnogoraca (The Montenegrin Voice), where he met like-minded intellectuals, Simo Matavulj, Pavle Rovinski, and Valtazar Bogišić. It was to him that was chiefly due the great success of the Liberals in older Serbian provinces. In 1890, Laza came to live in Sombor where he married Julijana Palanački in September 1895, and spent the rest of his life there. It was in Sombor that he wrote the hallucinatory night book, Dnevnik anova (Diary of Dreams), and the ever popular poem Santa Maria della Salute, which is considered the finest example of his love poems and elegies. He died on 27 November 1910 in Vienna while on a visit.

Ivan Andrić was born on 9 October 1892, to Bosnian Croat parents in Travnik, in the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was born as Ivan, but became known by the diminutive Ivo. When Andrić was two years old, his father Antun died. Because his mother Katarina was too poor to support him, he was raised by his mother's family in the town of Višegrad on the river Drina in eastern Bosnia, where he saw the 16th-century Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge, later made famous in his novel The Bridge on the Drina (Na Drini ćuprija).

Andrić attended the Jesuit gymnasium in Travnik, followed by Sarajevo's gymnasium and later he studied philosophy at the Universities of Zagreb (1912 and 1918), Vienna (1913), Kraków (1914), and Graz (PhD, 1924). Because of his political activities, Andrić was imprisoned by the Austrian government during World War I (first in Maribor and later in the Doboj detention camp) alongside other pro-Yugoslav civilians.

Andric started his literary career as a poet. In 1914 he was one of the contributors to Hrvatska mlada lirika (Young Croatian Lyrics)

Under the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later Kingdom of Yugoslavia) Andrić became a civil servant, first in the Ministry of Faiths and then the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he pursued a successful diplomatic career reaching as high as Deputy Foreign Minister.

During his diplomatic service, he worked in embassy at Holy See (1920), consulates in Bucharest, Trieste and Graz (1924), consulates in Paris and Marseilles (1927), and embassy in Madrid (1928). In 1939 he was appointed ambassador in Germany. He was also a delegate of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia at the 19th, 21st, 23rd and 24th sessions of the League of Nations in Geneva in the period 1930–1934.[9] Andrić greatly opposed the movement of Stjepan Radić, the president of the Croatian Peasant Party. His ambassadorship ended in 1941 after the German invasion of Yugoslavia. During World War II, Andrić lived quietly in Belgrade, completing three of his most famous novels which were published in 1945, including The Bridge on the Drina.

After the war, Andrić spent most of his time in his home in Belgrade and held a number of ceremonial posts in the new Communist government of Yugoslavia, and was also a member of the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1961, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "for the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country". He donated all of the prize money for the improvement of libraries in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Following the death of his second wife, Milica Babić-Andrić, in 1968, he began reducing his public activities. In 1969 he was elected an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina and in 1972 the University of Belgrade awarded him an honorary doctorate. As time went by, he grew increasingly ill and eventually died on 13 March 1975, in Belgrade, SR Serbia, SFR Yugoslavia.

He was buried in the Belgrade New Cemetery, in the Alley of Distinguished Citizens.

Bozidar Timotijevic completed elementary and high school in Rakovica where his heart and soul belonged for a lifetime. The first verses he wrote back in high school (1950-1951), the first book "Quartet" ("Kvartet"), he published with three other friends (Branko Jovanović, Tomislav Mijović, Prvoljub Pejatović). Bozidar was inducted in the Association of Writers in 1955. He studied the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, a group of international and Yugoslav literature. In the same year (1958) he published his first book, "The Great sleeper" ("Veliki spavac"). He worked as a journalist in a number of Yugoslav newspapers and on Radio Belgrade (1971-1980). Upon his request he was buried on the mountain of Tara, the mountain where he spent so much time dealing with his hobby - carpentry.

An influential protagonist of the Serbian national and cultural renaissance, he advocated Enlightenment and rationalist ideas while remaining a Serbian patriot and an adherent of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Founder of modern Serbian literature, he is commonly referred to by his mononym, first name alone. He became a monk in the Serb Orthodox monastery of Hopovo, in the Srem region, and acquired the name Dositej (Dositheus). He translated many European classics, including Aesop's Fables, into Serbian.Dositej Obradović was born Dimitrije Obradović in 1739 to poor parents in the village of Tschakowa (Serbian: Čakovo; modern-day Ciacova, Timiş County, Romania), in the region of Banat, then part of the Habsburg Empire. His parents died when he was a boy and he began life as an apprentice in the town of Temesvar, not too far from his village. His passion for study was strong, and he spent his spare time reading as soon as the day's work in the shop was over. His reading was mainly restricted to lives of the saints and accounts of the miracles they performed. He became so engrossed in this literature that he considered living in the desert, becoming a saint, and working miracles himself. Once he tried to run away, but was dissuaded by a colleague. His desire for the saintly life was strong, however, and the next time he succeeded.

Obradović was certain he had found the ideal spot for his life of piety at the monastery in Hopovo, 60 miles (97 km) from Temesvar. A fellow-apprentice in his shop named Nikola Putin joined Obradović in his adventure. The two boys counted up their money; three grossi was all the capital Obradović possessed and Nikola had no money of his own. Three grossi worth of bread was enough for a two-day journey, but they spent four days on foot. In those days, travel such as this was not uncommon for young Serbians travelling in search of an education; writer and historian Jovan Rajić travelled on foot from Hungary to Russia, a distance of 800 miles (1,300 km). Obradović and Nikola took the road along the river Begej until they reached the monastery at Hopovo towards the end of July 1757.

At the monastery, Obradović became a monk on 17 February 1757 and was very happy. No more work in the shop; he was free to devote all his time to reading, and since the library was full of sacred books he found himself in the surroundings he sought. His passion for the lives of the saints and his desire to become a saint himself reached their climax at this time. The longer he was there, the more his aspiration gradually waned. Finally, the desire for a saint's halo seemed so preposterous that Obradović dismissed it from his mind altogether. The beautiful, pleasant surroundings of the monastery were very different from the deserts for which Obradović had desired. The other monks fell short of sanctity, and Obradović was unable to overlook their shortcomings; he discovered that his thirst for knowledge was greater than his desire for sanctity. Obradović now desired to leave Hopovo for the world where great libraries abounded and good schools could be found.

After more than three years at Hopovo (where he learned Old Slavonic and classical Greek), Obradović left the monastery. On 2 November 1760 he went to Zagreb, where he mastered Latin. From there he planned to go further afield—perhaps to Russia, where several countrymen had already gone to pursue their studies or to Vienna, where the schools and libraries better suited his needs. Obradović was advised to go to Venetian-occupied Dalmatia first, where he might obtain a position as a schoolmaster and save enough money for further studies abroad. On 2 November 1760 he left the monastery of Hopovo, bound for Hilandar, Mount Athos. He arrived in the Serbian-populated region of inland Dalmatia in the spring of 1761, and was received warmly; Serbian priests from the district of Knin offered him a post as schoolmaster in Golubić. Obradovic's life in this Dalmatian village was idyllic. He was beloved by the villagers and it was a serene, comfortable and kindly atmosphere in which he lived, similar to that which surrounded the Vicar of Wakefield. From Dalmatia he went to Montenegro where he spent several months living in Podmaine Monastery during his visits to Boka Kotorska in 1764. then to Albania, Greece, Constantinople, and Asia Minor; stage by stage, always earning a living as a private tutor, Obradović visited all these lands (especially Greece, which was the most prosperous). Ten years (1761–1771) passed since he began his travels.
Obradović made great progress during this period. He learned Italian while in Dalmatia and acquired a thorough knowledge of Greek, both ancient and modern. He grew up bilingual (in Serbian and Romanian) and learned classical Greek, Latin, modern Greek, German, English, French, Russian, Albanian and Italian. For forty years he travelled throughout the Balkans, the Levant, Imperial Russia, and Europe: Albania, Dalmatia, Corfu, Greece, Hungary, Turkey, Germany, Romania, Russia, Poland, Italy, France and England. He showed a liking for England and the English. Finally he went to Belgrade at the invitation of Karađorđe Petrović, to become Serbia's first minister of education in the newly organized government. But the issue which interested Dositej most was the Serbian language—the adoption of a national language for Serbia, distinct from the Russo-Slavonic (in which her literature had until then been written. His strong (and sometimes narrow) patriotism did not blind him to the risk of such a proposal, but his lectures and writings against the use of Russo-Slavonic did more than anything else to save the Serbian language. Dositej also gave an impetus to a new generation of Serbian scholars, who became ardent supporters of the Serbian vernacular as a literary language.

Dositej and a score of other well-educated Serbs from the territory of Austria-Hungary helped introduce Western knowledge to the Serbs living in the Turkish-occupied part of Serbia He and Vuk Karadžić (whom Obradović influenced)[citation needed] are recognized as the fathers of modern Serbian literature. Because the Serbian populace often suffered famine, Obradović also introduced potato cultivation to Serbia. He died in Belgrade in 1811.