Tin Ujević
1891–1955 2 entries
Biography
Tin Ujević, born Augustin Josip Ujević, was a Croatian poet, one of the greatest poets of the South Slavic languages. He was born in 1891 in Vrgorac, in Dalmatia, went to school in Imotski, Makarska and Split, and in 1909 went to Zagreb to study at the university. As a young man he was drawn into the movement for the union of the South Slavs, and in 1913 he left for Paris, where he lived through the First World War among émigrés, writing for newspapers and reading the French poets.
He returned in 1919 and spent the following years in Belgrade, where his first collections, Lelek sebra and Kolajna, appeared in 1920 and 1926, and later lived in Sarajevo, Split and, from 1940, Zagreb. Restless and poor, he spent much of his life in cafés, a legendary figure of bohemia, and earned his living by writing for magazines and translating writers such as Proust, Whitman and Conrad. His poems move from love and loneliness to a hymn to the brotherhood of all people. He died in Zagreb in 1955 and is buried at Mirogoj cemetery.
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