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Momo Kapor was born in 1937 in Sarajevo as the only child of Bojana Kapor (née Velimirović) and Gojko Kapor.

It was predicted that I would be born, like other painters, in Florence, but on April 8, 1937, the stork that carried me had to make an emergency landing in the city of Sarajevo due to the thick fog that always reigns there. That's how the name of that beautiful and unfortunate city was written forever in all my documents. No matter where I go, I can't escape him.

One tragic event forever marked the early years, but also the entire life of Moma Kapor. During the German bombing of Sarajevo, on April 13, 1941, a bomb fell on the house where Momo's mother, grandmother and about forty other people took shelter, and four-year-old Momo was the only one who survived thanks to the fact that his mother covered him with her own body, remaining on instead of dead.

Thus, at the very beginning of his life, Momčilo was left without his 28-year-old mother, but also without his father, who was captured at the beginning of the war as a reserve officer of the royal army and interned in a camp in Nuremberg, from where he would leave only after the capitulation of Germany.

He spent his early childhood in Sarajevo, with his grandmother's sister Janja Baroš, and moved to Belgrade a year after the end of the war, with his father.

In September 1955, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, where he graduated in 1961, in the class of Professor Nedeljko Gvozdenović.

Momo Kapor is the author of over forty books. In addition to novels and short stories, he wrote plays, travelogues, essayistic prose and was engaged in illustration. His books have been translated into many foreign languages.

During his lifetime, he confirmed his belonging to the Serbian literary corpus and was a valuable chronicler of the events, often unfortunate, that followed his people.

Parallel to his literary work, he was also engaged in painting, and at the same time he illustrated almost all of his books. He had solo exhibitions in Serbia, USA, Italy, Switzerland, Venezuela, Germany and Great Britain.

He died in 2010 in Belgrade.

With the support of the Momo Kapor Fund, which was founded by daughters Ana and Jelena, the Faculty of Teachers in Belgrade organized the first scientific conference on Momo Kapor's literary work. The meeting was held in Belgrade and in Rome, and the result is the collection of works Narrator of Urban Melancholy, which is the most complete analysis of Kapor's literary oeuvre to date.

Photo: Laguna.rs