lit a candle 5h agoNever really got into poetry, I'll be honest, but I read a translation of Grad hrabrost a few years back while I was reading up on the siege and it stuck with me more than most of the history books did. 87 is a long life. Condolences to Sarajevo.
Their story
Bisera Alikadić was a Bosnian poet, novelist and children's author whose voice shaped Bosnian and Herzegovinian literature for more than half a century. Born on 8 February 1939 in the village of Podhum near Livno, she moved to Sarajevo in 1947 and stayed there for the rest of her life.…
Bisera Alikadić was a Bosnian poet, novelist and children's author whose voice shaped Bosnian and Herzegovinian literature for more than half a century. Born on 8 February 1939 in the village of Podhum near Livno, she moved to Sarajevo in 1947 and stayed there for the rest of her life. The city became her school, her workplace and, in the 1990s, the subject of some of her most important poems.
She began publishing as a child in the children's press. In 1958 she joined the staff of the National Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina (today the National and University Library), where she worked for about thirty years as a librarian and then senior librarian. She later said that the library was, for her, "a sea into which I dived."
Her first poems in book form appeared in 1959 in Intonacije, a shared volume with Simha Kabiljo and Tomislav Šipovac. Her first book of her own, the poetry collection Noć i ćilibar (Night and Amber), followed in 1972. Two years later she published the novel Larva (1974), and the Writers' Association of Bosnia and Herzegovina describes her as one of the first women writers in the country and the first Bosniak woman to publish a novel. Larva dealt openly with subjects that were then close to taboo, and it is still discussed and studied today. A second novel, Krug (The Circle), appeared in 1983, and both novels were adapted for radio.
Her poetry broke with the classical tradition. Critics noted its free verse, its near absence of rhyme and its urban mood, and its recurring themes of women, love, loneliness in the big city and human freedom. Collections such as Kapi i mahovina (1975), Drhtaj vučice (1981), Raspeće (1986), Dok jesam Ciganka (1991), Knjiga vremena (1999), Ludi kamen (2002), Žirafa u plamenu (2009) and Gola psovačica (2022) built a body of work that the poet Mile Stojić compared to a mountain spring, "an oasis of purity and clarity."
During the siege of Sarajevo she kept writing. Grad hrabrost (City of Courage), written during the first year of the war and published in a bilingual Bosnian and English edition in 1995, and Knjiga vremena (Book of Time) bear witness to wartime Sarajevo and especially to its civilian defenders.
Generations of children in Bosnia and Herzegovina grew up with her stories and poems. Kraljica iz dvorišta (The Queen of the Courtyard), Tačkasti padobran (The Polka Dot Parachute), Pjesmice ljestvice and Voz do neba (Train to the Sky) entered the school reading lists, and five of her stories were filmed for the children's programme of Federal Television. She also wrote three radio plays, Ljubavna priča, Gniježđenje and Malo zvono. Her work was translated into English, German, French, Macedonian, Albanian, Turkish, Italian and other languages, and the National and University Library put her forward as a Bosnian and Herzegovinian candidate for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2008 and again in 2022.
Her honours included the Order of Labour with Silver Wreath (1983), the Golden Brooch for Art from the magazine Žena 21 (1999), the Skender Kulenović Award (2003) and the Bosanski stećak, the highest award of the Writers' Association of Bosnia and Herzegovina, presented in December 2020 at the close of the 59th Sarajevo Poetry Days. In 2014 the Museum of Literature and Performing Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina devoted a literary portrait to her under the title "Vještičija nadarenost" (A Witch's Gift).
Bisera Alikadić died in a hospital room in Sarajevo shortly before dawn on 6 October 2026, at the age of 87. Her friend, the writer and physician Jasmina Hanjalić, wrote that her sparkling vitality had gone quiet "under the pressure of years and illness." Tributes came from the Writers' Association, the National and University Library, the Bosniak Cultural Community Preporod and many fellow writers. The writer and curator Indira Kučuk-Sorguč called her "a feminist without a flag and without a declaration," and Jasna Šamić remembered her as "not only a wonderful poet but a wonderful person." Funeral arrangements had not been made public at the time of writing.
Biography adapted from Sources: English and Bosnian Wikipedia; Klix.ba, Oslobođenje, Vijesti.ba, BHRT, FENA via N1, Radio Sarajevo and Dnevni avaz obituaries (6 October 2026); Društvo pisaca BiH statement via N1 and RTV Slo. Wikipedia ↗
In their own words
“The library was for me a sea into which I dived.”
Interview with Oslobođenje, March 2022 (translated from Bosnian).
“Very early I felt an enthusiasm for the written word in myself, so I too wanted to be a writer from the earliest time. I wanted to create beauty like the beauty others had offered me at the beginning of my life.”
Interview with Oslobođenje, March 2022 (translated from Bosnian).
“Poetry is a lifesaving rope.”
Interview with Oslobođenje, March 2022 (translated from Bosnian).
“Eroticism is a matter of life. Without eros there would be no life.”
On the reception of her novel Larva, interview with Oslobođenje, March 2022 (translated from Bosnian).
“I have always, in a way, tried to be engaged, because you have to show people, to at least try to plant a thought in them that something must be done to make things better.”
Interview with Oslobođenje, March 2022 (translated from Bosnian).
Photos
2Memorial wall with Bisera Alikadić's biography and poem, Kaptol, Sarajevo
Sept 2020 · by People Forever
Bisera Alikadić
by People Forever
