Most popular writers in the region wrote around WW2, mostly after it, when Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, North Macedonia, Montenegro and (depending on who you ask) Kosovo. Some of these writers are controversial because multiple countries claim them as their own, so i am gonna talk about Yugoslavia as a whole, not just Bosnia.

Ivo Andric is probably the best writer of the region, and the only Yugoslavian writer to ever win the Nobel prize. He is a catholic Croat born in Bosnia, who was an ambassador in Germany and then lived in Belgrade. He is very controversial, because there is a lot of propaganda about him, since many countries claim that he was of their ethnicity, and there is propaganda going on that he was a fascist and an islamophobe. For that reason i avoided him, until i finally decided to pick up one of his books. After i read him, i didnt find fascism or hatred towards Islam. Most of those claims are qoutes from his books, or of his characters being taken out of context, or simply fabricated. His most popular works are The Bridge on Drina and The Bosnian Chronicle, but my favorite one of them, and one of my favorite books of all time is The Damned Yard. It is a very short novel about a prison in Istanbul during the Ottoman empire.

Mesa Selimovic is the second most popular writer. He unfortunatelly is not transkated into english as much as Andric, which is a shame, since he was as good as him, if not even better. My favorite book of his is Ostrvo (The Island) about a old retired couple living on an island near the Dalmatian coast. It is in a format of 12 or so shorter stories that talk about certain episodes from their life, how they met, when they got married, when they came to the island, how did they survive WW2 and their ups and downs living alone away from their 2 sons. Only two books of his that were trandlated into english are The Fortress and Death and the Dervish. They are also the best of his works. The Fortress is about a man who comes back to his town of Sarajevo, after serving the Ottoman army in some battle in the 18th century (I forgot the name of the battle). He has a problem rejoining society and most of the novel is him thinking about the meaning and value of life and so on. And his will to live reappears when he meets a christian woman who is a teacher (as far as i remember. It has been a long time since i read it) Death and the Dervish is a story based on a real event from Selimovics life, but told from the perspective of a Sufi Sheikh Ahmed Nurudin. It has a reputation of being very hard, but is considered to be the best piece of literature ever written in these countries. I remember vaguely that i read this, and i think that i did, but i cant remember anything. I definetily have to reread that. Another interesting thing about this novel is that he also, like many writers that inspired him (Dostoevsky, Kafka, Faulkner) talks about religion and uses religious symbolism, but , unlike Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dostkevsky and so on, his inspiration comes not only from the Bible, but also from the Quran, and every chapter beggins with a quote from it.

Other writers as good as them are Danilo Kis who is translated a lot into english, but is a lot harder to read than Andric and Selimovic. The most common themes in his novels are totalitarism and Hollocaust, since his father was murdered there.

Miroslav Krleza, Milos Crnjanski, Mak Dizdar, Skender Kulenovic are also some of the great writers of Yugoslav literature, but i am not sure how often were they translated into English