Lalić was born in Belgrade; his father, Vlajko, was a journalist, and his grandfather Isidor Bajić was a composer.
After initially working as a literary editor for Radio Zagreb, he moved to Belgrade in 1961 to take up a new post: Secretary of the Yugoslav Writer's Union.
In her obituary of Lalić, Celia Hawkesworth spoke of "the central place in his work of memory: fragile in the face of the collapse of civilisations, but all we have.
Memory allows the poet to recreate brief instants of personal joy as well as to conjure up a sense of the distant past.
It allows each of us, as individuals condemned to solitude, to connect with a shared inheritance and feel, for a moment, part of a larger whole.
[4] Lalić was admired abroad and books of his poems have been translated into six languages (English, French, Italian, Polish, Hungarian and Macedonian).
Five are with Anvil Press (London): The sixth appeared with Belgrade University’s Univerzitetska biblioteka “Svetozar Marković”: