Mihailo Lalić was born on 7 October 1914 in Trepča, near Andrijevica.

He published a collection of poems Staze slobode (1948), collections of short stories Izvidnica (1948), Prvi snijeg (1951) and Posljednje brdo (1970), novels Svadba (1950), Zlo proljeće (1953), Raskid (1955), Lelejska gora (1957), Hajka (1960), Pramen tame (1970), Ratna sreća (1973), Zatočnici (1976),  Dokle gora zazeleni (1982), Gledajući dolje na drumove (1985), Odlučan čovjek (1990) and Tamara (1992), a book of travel writings and reportages Usput zapisano (1952) and several books of essays and diary entries.

He received many awards and honours for his literary work, including the distinguished Award of the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia (1954), the Award of the Association of Writers of Serbia (1955), the Njegoš Award (1963), the AVNOJ Award (1967), the 13^th July Awards (1968, 1970 and 1974); the NIN’s Award (1974), the Goran’s Award (1982).

He was a member of the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts and Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

He died in Belgrade, on 30 December 1992.

The literary work of Mihailo Lalić, one of the most important Montenegrin novelists of the twentieth century, was almost entirely devoted to a thematization of World War II and the cruel fate of an individual in the time of evil. In his last novel, Tamara (1992), published just before he died, Lalić approached a theme of war in a new way, without an idealization, showing the other side of the National Liberation Movement, the great mechanism of the revolution that “devours its children”.

After a minor traffic accident in which he got hit in the head, a retired President of the court, Djuras Vukčić, began a new life, filled with long dialogues with the ghosts of the past. By living in a parallel world of imaginary court proceedings, during which a reverse side of revolution and war was revealed, Djuras made a mosaic of “guilt” and the mysterious death of a student Tamara Godačić, convinced to have betrayed the ideals of the revolution. A gallery of witnesses parading in Djuras’s consciousness and an imaginary courtroom is convincingly pictures the tragedy of war and its companions –human hatred, envy, vengeance and betrayal.