David Albahari

David Albahari (Давид Албахари, ; 15 March 1948 – 30 July 2023) was a Serbian writer. Albahari wrote mainly novels and short stories in the Serbian language. He was also an established translator from English into Serbian. He was a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and a University of Belgrade graduate. Albahari was awarded the prestigious NIN Award for the best novel of 1996 for Mamac (Bait). He was among the award's finalists on seven other occasions.

Biography
David Albahari was born on 15 March 1948 in Peć, in the former Yugoslav region of Kosovo to a Sephardic Jewish family.

Albahari published the first collection of short stories Porodično vreme (Family Time) in 1973. He became better known to wider audience in 1982 with a volume Opis smrti (Description of Death) for which he got Ivo Andrić award. In 1991 he became the chair of the Federation of Jewish Communes of Yugoslavia, and worked on evacuation of the Jewish population from besieged Sarajevo. In 1994, he moved with his family to Calgary in the Canadian province of Alberta, where he lived until 2012 when he returned to live in Belgrade. He continued to write and publish in the Serbian language.

In the late 1980s, Albahari initiated the first formal petition to legalize marijuana in Yugoslavia.

Albahari died after a long illness in Belgrade on 30 July 2023, at the age of 75.

Awards
In 2012 he was awarded the Vilenica Prize. He also received the following awards: Ivo Andrić Award (1982), Stanislav Vinaver Award (1993), NIN Prize (1996), National Library of Serbia Award for bestseller (1996), International Balkanika Award (1996), Bridge Berlin Award (1998), City of Belgrade Award (2005) and Isidora Sekulić Award (2014).

On 29 July 2016, Albahari won the first award at the "Druga prikazna" ("Another Story") literary festival in Skopje, Macedonia.

Albahari was a contributor to Geist magazine.

Selected bibliography
His books have been translated into several languages and several of them are available in English.

Novels

 * Цинк (1988). Tsing, trans. David Albahari (1997)
 * Снежни човек (1995). Snow Man, trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać (2005)
 * Мамац (1996). Bait, trans. Peter Agnone (2001)
 * Гец и Мајер (1998). Götz and Meyer, trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać (Harvill, 2004; Harcourt, 2005)
 * Светски путник (2001). Globetrotter, trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać (2014)
 * Пијавице (2006). Leeches, trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać (2011)
 * Контролни пункт (2011). Checkpoint, trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać (2018)

Compilations in English

 * Words Are Something Else, ed. Tomislav Longinović; trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać (Northwestern University Press, 1996). Selections from collections published between 1973 and 1993.
 * Learning Cyrillic: Stories, trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać (Geopoetika, 2012; Dalkey Archive, 2014). Selections from collections published between 1997 and 2009.