Branko Ćopić (Serbian Cyrillic: Бранко Ћопић, pronounced [brǎːnkɔ t͡ɕɔ̂pit͡ɕ]; 1 January 1915 – 26 March 1984) was a Yugoslav writer.

However, the quality of his writings brought him inclusion into primary school curricula, which meant that some of his stories found their way into textbooks, and some novels became compulsory reading.

[10] His works have been translated into more than thirty languages,[9] including English, German, French, Russian,[11] Albanian, Czech, Dutch, Italian, Macedonian, Chinese, Polish, Romanian, Turkish, Slovak, and Slovene,[12] and some of them have been turned into TV series.

Ćopić Through Light and Darkness), one publication Šesdeset godina života i šest miliona knjiga Branka Ćopića: prigodna publikacija (transl.

[16][17] From at least 1951 until his death Branko Ćopić was a professional writer who lived solely of his writings as, due to his popularity, his books sold millions of copies, both in Yugoslavia and abroad.

[10] His first published short story was Smrtno ruvo Soje Čubrilove ("Death robe of Soja Čubrilova"), printed in 1936 in the Belgrade daily Politika.

[5] Ćopić enriched the war short stories with humor and comical elements while in the novels Prolom (transl.

He perceives the world from the off-perspective of the good "fools", but despite the quixotic fervor and humor, the sense of sorrow, anxiety, disappointment, and anti-utopian situations breaks through.

[18] In the early 1950s, he also wrote satirical stories, criticizing anomalies and personalities from the country's political life of the time, corrupted by the materialism of the "comrades", blossomed bureaucracy and sycophancy, which he despised, and for which he was considered a dissident and "heretic" who had to explain himself to the party ranks.

[13] Using humor and satire, Ćopić targeted what he perceived to be social ills of the fledgling Yugoslav communist society.

Heretic Story), mocking the new phenomena he observed around him such as state-owned company managers, Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) generals, government ministers, as well as their families and in-laws, misusing publicly funded resources including specific instances of government-provided luxury cars being used by individuals from the above groups in order to be chauffeured to university lectures at faculties they recently enrolled in.

He was immediately attacked by his war compatriot Skender Kulenović in the next edition of the literary magazine Književne novine.

He was reprimanded by the Yugoslav Communist Party (KPJ), while the country's leader Josip Broz Tito publicly criticized the writer in 1950: "He [Ćopić] presented our entire society, top to bottom, as a negative one, thus advocating its termination.

In the autumn of 1953, defending himself from the "new class" (as Đilas labeled the Communist nouveau riche), in a letter to Veljko Vlahović, Ćopić wrote: "A massive number of sycophants, slimes, and invertebrates who are milling around the party, occupying all positions and imposing themselves like horse flies.

In the late 1954, Ćopić's statement at the University of Belgrade Civil Engineering Faculty's forum that things still didn't change since he published Heretic Story, was followed by the publishing of the obvious police-informant's pamphlet in the student's magazine Student which declared Ćopić an enemy of the socialism.

Defending himself in front of the party commission, he stated: "I showed some of our people who were a bit dehumanized under the harsh conditions of the [war] battles, living in belief that they do what's best for the revolution."

After only several rehearsals of the play, dramatized by Soja Jovanović, it was banned from the Belgrade Drama Theatre, as "ordered from the top".

Apart from Tito, he was directly and publicly attacked and harassed by the party elite, including Moša Pijade and Milovan Đilas.

The final ten years of Ćopić's life they spent in the building across the Beograđanka tower in downtown Belgrade.

He admired Miguel de Cervantes, Maxim Gorky, Miloš Crnjanski, Ivan Cankar, Miroslav Krleža, Isidora Sekulić, Oskar Davičo, and Mihailo Lalić and called himself Lički Bosanac ("Lika's Bosnian").

[10] On Monday, 26 March 1984, Ćopić called his longtime close friend Momčilo Srećković to come from Obrenovac to Belgrade.

Srećković first met with Ćopić's wife, who told him that Branko had visited his doctor earlier that day and that he was depressed.

They walked to Terazije, where they had Cockta drink in the summer garden of the Hotel Moskva with Ćopić "opening his soul".

He said that for several years he had problems writing, naming The Mallow Color Garden, The Adventures of Nikoletina Bursać and The Eighth Offensive as his favorites, and was sentimental about his childhood.

Srećković went down the stairs to retrieve it, but when he climbed back to the bridge, Ćopić had already crossed the river to the other, New Belgrade side.

Srećković hurried to catch him, calling him, but when he got close, Ćopić threw himself over the metal fence, falling on the pavement on the Sava's left bank.

[27][28][29] Ćopić repeated several times to his close friend and biographer Enes Čengić that he would kill himself, and the reason he gave was his inability to even remember or recognize the people or things around him, which he blamed on his advanced sclerosis, so that he could no longer write a letter.

Ćopić himself considered that his life works are three novels: The Mallow Color Garden, The Adventures of Nikoletina Bursać and The Eighth Offensive.

[10] Film director Puriša Đorđević made a documentary on Ćopić in 2016, titled Moja Mala iz Bosanske Krupe.

[20] Author and literary critic Mihajlo Pantić [sr] wrote that, no matter whether he was writing poems, novels or stories, Ćopić was always a lyric poet.