IMPORTANT PERSONS OF THE B&H CULTURE AND SCIENCE

IVO ANDRIĆ
Ivo Andric, winner of the Nobel prize for literature, is the most famous name of literature of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the world.
He was born in a village Dolac near Travnik in 1892. After finishing elementary and high school in Travnik, Visegrad and Sarajevo, Andric continued his studies in Zagreb, Vienna and Krakow.
After receiving a doctorate in Graz in 1923, he joined the diplomatic core of the newly established Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Andric left his last diplomatic mission, the ambassadorship in Berlin, immediately after Germany attacked and occupied Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941.
After returning to Belgrade, Andric retired from public life, writing in the isolation of his home some of the best Romanesque, narrative and essay works in the Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian language.
During the World War II he wrote his most important book - a novel "Na Drini cuprija" (Bridge across Drina), for which he received a Nobel prize in 1961.
His other works - Travnicka hronika, Gospodjica, Pripovijetke, Prokleta avlija, and others belong to the highest category of literary art. Andric died on 13 March 1975.

VLADIMIR PRELOG
Bosnia and Herzegovina has another Nobel prize winner. That is Vladimir Prelog who received this highest international award for science in 1975.
Vladimir Prelog was born in 1906 in Sarajevo, who was at the time within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
He finished high school in Zagreb and received his university degree from the Czech Institute for Technology in Prague in 1929.
The university and research and scientific carrier of Vladimir Prelog was closely tied to the great scientist Leopold Ruzicka, who was his professor in the studies.
Ruzicka saved Prelog in the beginning of World War II by inviting him to work in the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH), where he completely developed his scientific potential, based on which in 1975 he split a reward for chemistry with the Australian scientist J.W. Cornforth.

MEŠA SELIMOVIĆ
In addition to Ivo Andric, Mehmedalija Mesa Selimovic is undoubtedly the most reputable literary name of cultural history of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
He was born in 1910 in Tuzla. After graduating from the Philosophic Faculty in Belgrade and worked as a gymnasium professor in his hometown until the World War II broke out. He was imprisoned in 1942 and in 1943 he joined the partisans, an antifascist army of the peoples of Yugoslavia. After the war, he worked for a while as an university teacher in Sarajevo and assumed many important cultural duties. He spent his last years in Belgrade, his wife's hometown.
Selimovic is a prosaic writer with variety of themes and genre orientation. His literary opus includes several books of short stories, novels, studies, essays, and polemic writings.
He achieved his biggest success with the novel "Dervis i smrt” (Dervish and death), for which he received all Yugoslav literary awards. His following novel "Tvrdava" (Fortress) (1970) was also very popular. Mesa Selimovic died in Belgrade on 11 July 1982.

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