Biography of Judita Šalgo (1941–1996)

Judita Šalgo was a writer, essayist, and translator from Hungarian and English.

She was born in Novi Sad into a Jewish family, a background that deeply shaped both her personal life and her literary sensibility. During World War II, her parents were taken to concentration camps—her father was killed, while her mother survived and later returned to Novi Sad. Until her mother’s return, Judita was cared for by a Hungarian woman who became like a second mother to her. The themes of motherhood, substitute maternal figures, and questions of identity would remain central to her life and creative work.

After the war, and following her mother’s return, Judita began learning Serbian, as Hungarian had been her native language. She graduated from the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory in Belgrade and later worked as an editor at Matica Srpska, though she was eventually dismissed, allegedly for political reasons.

“I don’t know how things stand in the lunatic asylums and brothels of Europe, but everything is fine here.” – The Road to Birobidzhan

Her early writing was associated with the neo-avant-garde movement that emerged in Novi Sad during the 1960s and 1970s as a response to Yugoslav modernism. This movement was marked by experimentation, particularly in language. Later, Šalgo turned toward novel writing and postmodernist poetics, producing her most acclaimed work, the novel Put u Birobidžan (The Road to Birobidzhan). Although she never explicitly identified as a feminist, she often explored women’s experiences and perspectives in her writing.

Some of her most reknowned works are 67 Minuta naglas (67 Minutes Out Loud, 1980), Život na stolu (Life on the Table, 1986), Da li postoji život (Does Life Exist?, short stories, 1995), and the unfinished novel Kraj puta (End of the Road, 2004), a continuation of The Road to Birobidzhan.

In 1998, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Vojvodina Writers’ Society.