Ras was born on 1 January 1941 in Subotica, where she lived and went to school until she was eighteen, when she started to study acting and dramaturgy in Belgrade where she now lives. She performed in theatres throughout the former Yugoslavia and Serbia, on television in series written by Siniša Pavić and Dragoslav Lazić, and in films directed by Dušan Makavejev, Aleksandar Petrović, Živko Nikolić, Emir Kusturica, and Ferenc Kardos among others.

She is the widow of Radomir Stević Ras, painter as well as founder and owner of a private theatre during the period of the Communist regime. Their daughter was Kruna Ras, a Serbian writer, who died in 1993 at age 24.

She has published collections of poems: In the Good Old Days, When Mummy Buys Me Some Money and Bed of Silver, with which she took part in the Struga Poetry Evenings in 2004; a collection of short stories: From the top of the Moon’s mountain I looked down on my round grave, the novels: Don’t crow after me on the stairs that I’m the most beautiful of all, The Grey Woman, …Cock on the Block…, House for Sale and With Eve to Paradise, which is about how no nation should be reproached because of bad rulers who are always prepared to sacrifice their people, and which appeared in Narodna knjiga bookshops towards the end of December 2004 and was sold out in a matter of days.

Ras has been awarded several important domestic literary awards: Woman’s Pen (for …Cock on the Block…, 2001); The Kočić Book (for House for Sale, 2003), Ascendancy of year (for Bed of silver, 2006) as well as The International Man Booker Peoples’ Prize in 2005 for her book Born Dead, in Timothy Byford’s translation.