Danilo Kis; Yugoslav-Born Writer, Essayist

Danilo Kis, 54, a Yugoslav-born writer and essayist whose works blended fact and fiction to describe the horror of the Holocaust and Josef Stalin’s forced labor camps. Kis was born in 1935 in Subotica, on Yugoslavia’s border with Hungary. He studied comparative literature and then began his literary career translating the works of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Pierre Corneille and Raymond Queneau, among others, into his native Serbo-Croatian. His novels include “Jardin, Cendre” (Garden, Ashes) (1971), “Un Tombeau Pour Boris Davidovitch” (A Tomb for Boris Davidovitch) (1980), “Sablier” (Hourglass) (1982), and “Chagrins Precoces” (Early Sadness) (1984). His best-known collection of short stories, “Encyclopedie des Morts” (Encyclopedia of the Dead), was published in 1985. In 1980 he received the Grand Aigle d’Or literary prize from the city of Nice for his life’s work. In Paris on Sunday of cancer.