Sreten Ugričić (b. 1961) is a Yugoslav-born writer, philosopher, and conceptual artist currently residing in Switzerland. He has published extensively across diverse genres, including novels, short stories, essays, and philosophical texts. Since 2016, he has served as a research associate in Cultural Studies and Science Studies at the University of Lucerne. His PhD thesis, titled Meady-rade (an allusion to Marcel Duchamp’s concept of “ready-made” art), focuses on the political censorship of art.

He graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade and worked as a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Philosophy in Prishtina (1992-1997), where he taught courses on Aesthetics and Ethics. During this period, he also served as a Program Manager for the Open Society Foundation, operating in Prishtina (1993-1997), Belgrade, and Budapest. Ugričić was later appointed a visiting scholar at the John W. Kluge Center in Washington, D.C. , and worked as an associate researcher at Stanford University from 2013 to 2015, where he taught courses on literature and political culture in the former Yugoslavia. While at Stanford, he acted as an advisor for a dialogue project in Tirana initiated by the Albanian Prime Minister, which expanded his research into intercultural communication.

During the 1990s, Ugričić was the editor-in-chief of the journals Pismo and Univerzitetska misao. He worked as the director of the National Library of Serbia from 2001 to 2012. In 2010, he was appointed co-chairman of the Selection Committee for the World Digital Library (WDL) and successfully reformed the National Library by introducing modern digitization processes. He became widely known for his critical approach and public engagement both as a writer and as a librarian. A prominent example is his three-part essay Reasons for Forgiveness, published in 2006 and read in Vukovar, Croatia; it was subsequently read many years after the war at the POLIP International Literature Festival in Prishtina in 2019. His dedication to democratic transitions and the prosecution of war crimes, especially those committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995, faced fierce opposition from contemporary political leaders in Serbia.

In 2012, Ugričić was dismissed from his post at the National Library, following public accusations of terrorism made by the Interior Minister. It was accompanied by a sustained campaign in state-aligned print and electronic media, ultimately leading to his emigration from Serbia. The case exposed severe state and institutional repression, systemic corruption, and a blatant violation of freedom of speech and expression in Serbian society.

His monograph Život je inostranstvo (Life is a Foreign Land, 2014) published by OFK Cetinje (Montenegro) problematizes the concept of responsibility as a prerequisite for civic freedom. Ugričić argues that an absence of responsibility permeates all aspects of Serbian society – from television news and daily conversations to personal, political, historical or present states of affairs.

His dystopian novel Neznanom junaku (To the Unknown Hero, 2010) was translated into German as An den unbekannten Helden by Maša Dabić in 2012. The work offers a deconstruction of historical narratives surrounding the 1914 assassination of the Austro-Hungarian archduke in Sarajevo. Written with heavy irony, the book examines an oppressed society fractured by intense nationalism while reflecting on individual responsibility within such a system, exposing how state manipulation erodes personal freedoms.

Infinitiv (Infinitive, 1997) is a postmodernist novel and philosophical study centered on a fictional contemporary American philosopher, through which the author explores the very form of the modern novel. His additional publications encompass the novel Maja i Maja i ja (Maja & Me & Maja, 2012; first edition 1993), Uvod u astronomiju (Introduction to Astronomy, 2006), Bog jezika i druge priče (2000), and numerous papers published across the Balkan region and internationally. A German selection of his essays, titled Rätsel. Wendungen. Fallen, was printed in 2022.