Borislav Mihajlovic-Mihiz

Borislav Mihajlovic-Mihiz (Irig, 17 October 1922 – Belgrade, 15 December 1997) was a Serbian and Yugoslav literary critic, writer, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, travel writer, poet, playwright and member of the Crown Council.

He finished the classical high school in Sremski Karlovci. After the end of the war, he enrolled at the Faculty of Philosophy, a group for Serbo-Croatian language and literature in Belgrade. After graduating in 1949, he was employed as an assistant at the Museum of Vuk and Dositej, where he remained for about a year. From 1951 to 1954, he worked as a literary critic for NIN, but due to his association with the then ostracized Milovan Djilas, he was forced to leave this job. In 1956, he became the manager of the Matica Srpska library. From 1960 to 1963, he worked as the artistic director of Avala Film. He became the editor of the publishing company Prosveta in 1967, and after four months he left this job due to disagreement with the editorial policy. Together with Mira Trailovic, he created the Atelier 212 theater and was its artistic advisor from 1971 to 1983.

He had collaborated in the following newspapers: NIN, Politika, Knjizevne novine, Knjizevna rec, Dnevnik, Zagreb’s Vjesnik, Ljubljana’s Delo, Vienna’s Die Presse, Duga, etc.; in the journals Letopis Matice srpske, Knjizevnost, Savremenik, Delo and many others in which he published articles, essays, reviews, travelogues, feuilletons, interviews.

He is the winner of many literary awards: Sterija Award for the play Banovic Strahinja; Sterija Award for dramatization of Nusic’s Autobiography, Sterija Award for adaptation of Pekic’s Correspondence, Marin Drzic Award of the Association of Dramatic Artists of Yugoslavia for the drama Banovic Strahinja; the “Djordje Jovanovic” Library Award for the book Critics Portraits, the “Milos Crnjanski” Award for the first book “Autobiography – About Others”; Chalabrcak Award for the essay “In the Sign of Corn”.

He published poems, literary criticism, essays, travelogues, polemics, plays. Several dramatizations of famous literary works came out of his pen. Belgrade theaters, as well as several other stages across the country, performed Mihiz’s plays.

Since 2021, Matica Srpska has been publishing the collected works of Borislav Mihajlovic Mihiz.