Borislav Pekić (, ; 4 February 1930 – 2 July 1992) was a Serbian and Yugoslav writer and political activist. He was born in 1930, to a prominent family in Montenegro, at that time part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. From 1945 until his emigration to London in 1971, he lived in Belgrade. He was also one of the founding members of the Democratic Party in Serbia. He is considered one of the most important Serbian literary figures of the 20th century. Life and works Early life and novels Borislav Pekić spent his childhood in different cities of Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia. He graduated from high school in 1945 in Belgrade and shortly afterward was arrested with the accusation of belonging to the secret association "Yugoslav Democratic Youth" and sentenced to fifteen years of prison. During the time in prison, he conceived many of the ideas later developed in his major novels. He was released after five years and in 1953 began studying experimental psychology at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy, although he never earned a degree. In 1958 he married Ljiljana Glišić, the niece of Milan Stojadinović, Prime Minister of Yugoslavia (1935–1939) and a year later their daughter Aleksandra was born, who was later married to a German aristocrat, Baron Victor von Maltzahn. 1958 marked also the year when Pekić wrote his first of over twenty original film scripts for the major film studios in Yugoslavia, among which Dan četrnaesti ("The Fourteenth Day") represented Yugoslavia at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival. For years Pekić had been working on several novels and when the first of them, Vreme čuda (1965), came out, it caught the attention of a wide reading audience as well as the critics. In 1976 it was published in English by Brace Harcourt in New York as The Time of Miracles. It was also translated into French in 1986, Polish in 1986, Romanian in 1987, Italian in 2004, and Greek in 2007. Pekić's first novel clearly announced two of the most important characteristics of his work: sharp anti-dogmatism and constant skepticism regarding any possible 'progress' mankind has achieved over the course of history. When Pekić authored an anthology of Children's poetry, Grigorije Vitez criticised him because, even though Serbian literature for children is de facto richer than Croatian, he should have included more poets from Croatia. During the 1968–1969 period, Pekić was one of the