Dino Merlin

Dino Merlin, born Edin Dervišhalidović on 12 September 1962 in Alifakovac, Sarajevo, is a Bosnian singer and songwriter whose songs are known across the whole former Yugoslavia. He first made his name as the singer and songwriter of the band Merlin, whose name, the story goes, was drawn from a hat. Its first album, "Kokuzna vremena", came out in 1985, sold about 60,000 copies and brought "U kandžama jastreba" and "Ljubav nije paradajz".

Merlin made five albums in all: "Kokuzna vremena" (1985), "Teško meni sa tobom (a još teže bez tebe)" (1986), whose "Nek padaju ćuskije" was a major hit, "Merlin" (1987), "Nešto lijepo treba da se desi" (1989), with "Mjesečina" and "Bosnom behar probeharao", and "Peta strana svijeta" (1990). In the same years he wrote several hits for Vesna Zmijanac, among them their duet "Kad zamirišu jorgovani". The band ended with the outbreak of the Bosnian War, and in 1991 he went solo as Dino Merlin.

He wrote "Sva bol svijeta", performed by Fazla as Bosnia and Herzegovina's first Eurovision entry in 1993, and the state commissioned him to write "Jedna si jedina", which was the national anthem until the late 1990s. He sang "Putnici" with Béatrice at Eurovision in Jerusalem in 1999, finishing seventh, and returned in 2011 with "Love in Rewind", which came sixth.

His solo albums are "Moja bogda sna" (1993), "Fotografija" (1995), "Sredinom" (2000), "Burek" (2004), "Ispočetka" (2008), "Hotel Nacional" (2014) and "Mi" (2025). On the Sredinom tour he filled Koševo stadium in Sarajevo before about 80,000 people, and he has since filled it three more times, the only artist to do so four times. The Hotel Nacional tour is reported to have drawn 900,000 people across four continents.

Dino Merlin's duets include "Godinama" with Ivana Banfić (2000), "I Have No Cannons That Roar" with Yusuf Islam (2000), "Ti si mene" with Nina Badrić (2004), "Supermen" with Željko Joksimović (2004), "Kao moja mati" with Zdravko Čolić (2006), "Dabogda" with Hajrudin Varešanović of Hari Mata Hari and "Med" with Emina Jahović. He won a Davorin award in 2005, an International Humanitarian Award in Urfa, Turkey, in 2013 and the Sixth of April Sarajevo Award in 2017.