Writer and politician Dobrica Cosic dies

BELGRADE - Great Serbian author, member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts and first president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Dobrica Cosic has died in Belgrade, his family confirmed on Sunday.

Cosic was born in the village of Velika Drenova, near Trstenik, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, in 1921.

Before World War Two he attended a vocational agriculture school in Aleksandrovac.

Cosic joined the Partisans, an anti-fascist resistance movement, at their very beginnings, in 1941, and served as the political commissar of the Resava Partisan Detachment. After the war, he graduated from the junior college of politics in Belgrade.

He published his first novel, Daleko je sunce (Faraway is the Sun), in 1951 and in it he focuses on World War Two and the revolution. Ten years later, he published Deobe (Divisions).

His novel Koreni (Roots) came out in 1954 and is one of the first modern Serbian novels.

The four-volume epic Vreme smrti (A time of Death) was published in stages between 1972 and 1979 and describes the suffering of the Serbian people in World War One.

He published Vreme zla (A Time of Evil), which comprises Gresnik (Sinner) and Otpadnik (Renegade) and Vernik (Believer), in the 1980s and Vreme vlasti (A Time of Power) in 1995.

A selection of his journal entries entitled Piscevi zapisi (Writer's Notes) was published as a series of books between 2001 and 2008.

His last novel, Vreme zmija (A Time of Snakes) became available in 2009 and includes his journal entries during the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. The entries span the period from March 21, 1999, to January 1, 2000.

His last journal, U tudjem veku (In Someone Else's Century), was published in...