Branko Ćopić (,Ćopić ; 1 January 1915 – 26 March 1984) was a Yugoslav writer. He wrote poetry, short stories and novels, and became famous for his stories for children and young adults, often set during World War II in revolutionary Yugoslavia, written with characteristic Ćopić's humor in the form of ridicule, satire and irony.
As a professional writer, Ćopić was very popular and was able to sell large number of copies. This allowed him to live solely from his writings, which was rare for the novelists in Yugoslavia at the time. However, the quality of his writings brought him inclusion into primary school curriculum, which meant that some of his stories found their way in to the text-books and some novels became compulsory reading.
In the early 1950s, he also wrote satirical stories, criticizing social and political anomalies and personalities from the country's political life of the time, for which he was considered a dissident and "heretic", and had to explain himself to the party hierarchy.
Biography
Ćopić was born into a Bosnian Serb family on 1 January 1915 in the village of Hašani, near Bosanska Krupa in the Bosanska Krajina region of western Bosnia. He attended the junior gymnasium in Bihać, and teacher's colleges in Banja Luka, Sarajevo and Karlovac before moving to Belgrade to study at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy until his graduation in 1940. He admitted that after arriving to Belgrade in 1936, he was "afraid of the big city" and was especially concerned he might get lost.
During the uprising in Bosanska Krajina in 1941, he joined the Partisans and remained in their ranks until the end of World War II. He was his detachment's political commissar, war correspondent for the Borba newspaper and a cultural proletarian. That period of his life influenced much of his literary work as can be seen by the themes he would go on to write about. He was recipient of the Commemorative Medal of the Partisans of 1941. At the end of the war he returned to Belgrade where he worked as an editor in several magazines until 1949, including the children's magazine Pionir ("Pioneer"). On 16 December 1965 he became an associate member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and was elected to the full membership 7 March 1968, and a member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Many of his novels and stories were included into primary school curriculum and were part of the text-books. His works have been translated into more than a thirty languages, including English, German, French, Russian, Albanian, Czech, Dutch, Italian, Macedonian, Chinese, Polish, Romanian, Turkish, Slovak, Slovene, and some of them have been turned into TV series. He was featured on the 0.50 Bosnia and Herzegovina convertible mark bill, which has been withdrawn from circulation and replaced with coins.
Ćopić's biographer and close friend was Enes Čengić, a fellow Bosnian-Herzegovinian journalist and writer, who lived and worked in Zagreb, and was also biographer and sole beneficiary of Miroslav Krleža will regarding his entire opus, including significant portion of copy-rights. Čengić has written three books (in several volumes) on Ćopić, namely Branko Ćopić i njegovi junaci u slici i prilici (), Ćopićev humor i zbilja (1 i 2) ( 1 and 2), Ćopić kroz svjetla i pomrčine (), one publication Šesdeset godina života i šest miliona knjiga Branka Ćopića: prigodna publikacija (), while his daughter published one more, titled Branko Ćopić: Treba sanjati (), after her father passed away from his unpublished manuscript.
Literary career
From at least 1951 until his death Branko Ćopić was a professional writer, who lived solely of his writings as, due to his popularity, his books were sold in millions of copies, both in Yugoslavia and abroad.
His first published short story was Smrtno ruvo Soje Čubrilove ("Death robe of Soja Čubrilova"), printed in 1936 in the Belgrade daily Politika. Politika's editor, Žika Milićević, was known for his strictness and he initially rejected many other Ćopić's stories, but he continued to write them and to send them to Milićević until he decided to print them in the newspapers. Milićević promised to that he will publish two of his stories each month, if they are good. Before 1941 and outbreak of the World War II in Yugoslavia, Politika published 125 of his stories. Ćopić considered this collaboration with Politika as a "great stimulus" and the "beginning of the serious literary affirmation".