Kole Casule is a prolific Macedonian novelist and playwright who is also a prominent Macedonian activist and patriot. His early writings, published in extracts in magazines when he was a student, were part of a movement among young Macedonian writers to write poetry and prose in their own language. Casule is one of the initiators of contemporary Macedonian literature and a pioneer particularly in the field of drama, to which he devoted himself almost exclusively in the years from 1950 to 1970.

Casule was born on 12 March 1921 in Prilep, Macedonia, the son of a high-school teacher. During his high-school years in Prilep and Bitola and his later study of medicine, from 1938 to 1941, at Belgrade University, he became a convinced and dedicated Macedonian patriot and communist, although in recent years he seems to have become disillusioned by communism. He started writing when he was an adolescent; later he stated that "I...