Filip David, writer, former editor of the Drama Program on Belgrade Television, professor of dramaturgy at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, but above all a unique fighter for peace and denouncer of Serbian crimes, has died at the age of 84, after a long and serious illness, Serbian media reported on Monday.
He was one of the founders of the Belgrade Circle, which united writers and intellectuals with the idea of resistance in the face of “hatred, ethnic cleansing, warmongering rhetoric, expulsion and forced displacement.” In April 1992, the first meeting of those who called themselves “the other Serbia” was held in Belgrade, while Bosnia and Herzegovina was in the flames of war, a year earlier Croatia and Slovenia had declared independence, and nationalist rhetoric was spreading more and more.
"We advocated for another Serbia that does not agree with the crimes. It may not seem like a large number, but it is, because these were names that meant something, it was a resistance to everything that was happening in the environment in which we lived," Filip David told BBC Serbian in June 2022.
Filip David, of Jewish origin, was born in 1940 in Kragujevac, graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy at the Academy of Theatre, Film and Television. In 1991, he was dismissed from his job due to the formation of the Independent Trade Union of Belgrade Radio and Television. He is one of the founders of the Association of Independent Writers, founded in 1989 in Sarajevo, which brought together the most important writers from the former Yugoslavia.
He has written many television dramas and film scripts. He has published three books of stories: “The Well in the Dark Forest”, “Notes on the Real and the Unreal”, “The Prince of the Hearth”, the novels “Pilgrims of Heaven and Earth”, “Dreams of Love and Death”, “House of Memory and Forgetting”, the book “Fragments from Dark Times” and “Are We Monsters”, “Worlds in Chaos”. Together with the writer Mirko Kovač, they published “The Book of Letters 1992-1995”. His stories and novels have received several awards: the award for the best young writer, the award of the Writers’ Association “Milan Rakić”, the BIGZ and Prosveta Award for the best book of the year, the Andrić Award, the NIN weekly for the best novel of the year, the “Meša Selimović” award in Tuzla. Since the beginning of the war in the former Yugoslavia, he has written a large number of engaging critical texts published in "Nasha borba", "Feral Tribun", "Danas" and in many newspapers and magazines at home and abroad and broadcast on Radio France (RFI).
He was a member of the "Literary Group 99", founded at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1999. Filip David's books have been translated into many languages (Hungarian, French, Albanian, Swedish, Slovenian, German, Italian, English, Polish, Macedonian, Esperanto), and his stories have been included in over twenty anthologies in various world languages.