David Albahar

David Albahari (Peć, 15 March 1948 – Belgrade, 30 July 2023) was a Serbian novelist and translator who wrote mainly in Serbian and was also an established translator from English. He was a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and his work, rooted in former Yugoslavia and later in the diaspora, often returned to memory of the Holocaust and to Jewish identity.

Born in Peć, then in the Yugoslav region of Kosovo, he came from a family shaped by catastrophe. His father was of Sephardic Jewish origin, and his mother, of Serbian origin, had previously been married to an Ashkenazi Jewish man who was killed in the Holocaust, along with their children and the father's first family. He studied English philology at the University of Belgrade and published his first collection of stories, Porodično vreme, in 1973. He reached a wider readership in 1982 with Opis smrti, which won the Andrić Prize.

In the 1990s he led the Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia and helped evacuate Jews from besieged Sarajevo. In 1994 he moved with his family to Calgary, in Alberta, Canada, where he lived until 2012, when he returned to Belgrade. Throughout, he kept writing in Serbian. His spare, often fragmented prose deals with memory, loss and everyday life, and in novels such as Mamac (1996), which won the NIN Award, personal experience and history meet. His legacy lies partly in bringing contemporary Serbian fiction to readers in other languages, as several of his books appeared in English thanks to translators such as Ellen Elias-Bursać.