He graduated from high school in 1948 in Belgrade and shortly afterward was arrested[4] with the accusation of belonging to the secret association "Yugoslav Democratic Youth" and sentenced to fifteen years of prison.

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.

Despite his ideological distance from the mainstream opposition movements, the new political climate further complicated his relationship with the authorities, who refused him a passport for some time.

Following Pekić's emigration to London in 1971,[5] the Yugoslav authorities still considered him persona non grata and for several years they prevented his books from being published in Yugoslavia.

Based in part on Pekić's own prison experiences, this novel offers an insight into the methods, logic and psychology of a modern totalitarian regime.

In 1978, after more than two decades of preparation, investigation and study, the first volume of Zlatno runo ("The Golden Fleece", 1978–1986) was published, fully establishing Pekić as one of the most important Serbian authors.

The Golden Fleece prompted comparison by international critics to James Joyce’s Ulysses and its narrative patterns of classical myths, to Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and its long family history and evolution of pre-war society, and to Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point and its inner tensions created through a maze of conflicting perspectives; yet The Golden Fleece was also hailed as unique.

He had been collecting material for a book about the lost island of Atlantis, with the intention to give “a new, although poetical, explanation of the roots, development, and the end of our civilization”.

Despite the classical sources that inspired his anthropological interests, Pekić decided to project his new vision into the future and thus avoid the restrictions of the ‘historical models’, which he had inevitably had to confront in his earlier remakes of ancient myths.

The gothic stories Novi Jerusalim ("The New Jerusalem") were published in 1989, and Pekić accepted the Majska Rukovanja award in Montenegro in 1990 for his literary and cultural achievements.

Sixteen were published in his Odabrana dela (Selected works, 1984) and his play Generali ili srodstvo po oruzju (The Generals or Kinship-In-Arms, 1969) can be found in any anthology of Serbian contemporary drama.

The letters were also broadcast for listeners in Serbia, for whom Pekić particularly enjoyed making numerous humorous comparisons between the English and his fatherland's governments, country and people.

Posthumously, in 1992, Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia awarded Pekić the Order of the White Eagle, being the highest honour bestowed by Yugoslavian Royal Family.

[citation needed] A large body of his work was, and continues to be, published posthumously:[6] Vreme reči ("The Time of Words"), 1993; Odmor od istorije ("A Break from History"), 1993; Graditelji ("The Builders"), 1994; Rađanje Atlantide ("The Birth of Atlantis"), 1996; Skinuto sa trake ("Transferred from Tapes"), 1996; U traganju za Zlatnim runom ("In Search of the Golden Fleece"), 1997; Izabrana pisma iz tuđine ("Selected Letters from Abroad"), 2000; Političke sveske ("Political Notebooks"), 2001; Filosofske sveske ("Philosophical Notebooks"), 2001; Korespondencija kao život, 1&2 ("Correspondence as a Life"), 2002–2003; Sabrana pisma iz tuđine ("Collection of letters from abroad"), 2004, Roboti i sablasti ("Robots and Wraiths", collection of unpublished plays), 2006, Izabrane drame ("Selected plays"), 2007, Izabrani eseji ("Selected essays"), 2007, Moral i demokratija ("Moral and democracy", a collection of interviews and essays), 2008, Marginalije i moralije (collected thoughts from published and unpublished work), 2008.

On 1 and 2 July 2000 the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade held a symposium with the theme: ‘Literary work of Borislav Pekić on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of his birth’.

Pekić has left a vast corpus of high literary quality characterized by following traits: narrative structures of growing complexity that, in the case of The Golden Fleece cross the fuzzy bounds of the post-modern novel and can be best described by the author's sub-title "Phantasmagoria" (this mammoth work is more than 3,500 pages long); the presence of autobiographical thread one can detect in all major Pekić's works, but especially in his vivid and unsentimental memoirs on his years as a political prisoner and essayist books on life in Britain; obsession with the theme of personal freedom crushed by the impersonal mechanism of the totalitarian power.