Meša Selimović

Mehmed "Meša" Selimović
Meša Selimović on a 2010 Serbian stamp
Born	(1910-04-26)26 April 1910 Tuzla, Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austro-Hungarian Empire
Died	11 July 1982(1982-07-11) (aged 72) Belgrade, SR Serbia, Yugoslavia
Resting place	Novo groblje, Belgrade
Occupation	Writer, professor, art director
Language	Serbo-Croatian
Nationality	Yugoslav
Alma mater	University of Belgrade
Notable works	Death and the Dervish (1966)
Spouse	Draga (d. 1999)
Children	Daughters Maša and Jesenka

Mehmed "Meša" Selimović (pronounced [mɛ̌xmɛd mɛ̌ːʃa sɛlǐːmɔʋitɕ]; Serbian Cyrillic: Мехмед "Меша" Селимовић; 26 April 1910 – 11 July 1982) was a Yugoslav writer. His novel Death and the Dervish is one of the most important literary works in post-World War II Yugoslavia. Some of the main themes in his works are the relations between individuality and authority, life and death, and other existential problems.

Selimović was born to a prominent Bosnian Muslim family on 26 April 1910 in Tuzla (present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina), where he graduated from elementary school and high school. In 1930, he enrolled to study the Serbo-Croatian language and literature at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philology and graduated in 1934. In 1936, he returned to Tuzla to teach in the gymnasium that today bears his name. He spent the first two years of World War II in the hometown Tuzla, where he was arrested for participation in the Partisan anti-fascist resistance movement in 1943. After the release, he moved to the liberated territory, became a member of Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the political commissar of Tuzla Detachment of the Partisans. During the war, Selimović's brother, also a communist, was executed by partisans' firing squad for alleged theft, without trial; Selimović's letter in defense of the brother was to no avail. That episode apparently affected Meša's later contemplative introduction to Death and the Dervish, where the main protagonist Ahmed Nurudin fails to rescue his imprisoned brother.