The Bridge Over the Drina

In high school, one Saturday, I started reading a book by the Yugoslav novelist Ivo Andric: The Bridge on the Drina. By the time I finished it something in me had shifted forever * New Statesman *
Despite its scale, what makes the book extraordinary is the tender insight with which it treats these individual lives, whether Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim or Jewish * Independent *
Perhaps the most widely translated Yugoslav book since the last war is Ivo Andric’s The Bridge on the Drina… No better example could have been selected with which to introduce the American public to contemporary Yugoslav prose * New York Times *
The best kind of fictionalised history * Daily Telegraph *
The wealth and variety of its fictional elements carry it so far beyond the confines of a straightforward novel, it cannot be limited to such a description. It puts one in mind of a collection of tales, but no collection of tales (not even A Thousand and One Nights or Washington Irving’s stories) ever possessed such a unity and continuity of theme * Le Monde *
Andric possess the rare gift in a historical novelist of creating a period-piece, full of local colour, and at the same time characters who might have been living today * Times Literary Supplement *
Just as the bridge on the Drina brought East and West together so your work has acted as a link, combining the culture of your country with other parts of the planet

Ivo Andric was born in 1892 in Travnik, Bosnia of Croat parents and grew up alongside Orthodox Christians, Muslims and Roman Catholics in Visegrad, the town on the banks of the Drina in which the book is set. Until 1941 he served as a Yugoslav diplomat, then, placed under house arrest in Belgrade by the occupying Germans, Andric turned to writing. In 1961 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1975.

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