Milo Dor was born a Serb. His father was a surgeon, his mother lead a beauty salon. Dor grew up in the Banat and later in Belgrade. In highschool, he was a member of the Communist Youth and wrote lyrics. Having organised a school strike in 1940, he was expelled. Nevertheless, he passed his final exams in the following year. He participated in the resistance movement against the German occupants. In 1942, he was arrested; stays in prison and camps followed until he was deported to Vienna in 1943. A year later, he was arrested again and put into "protective custody" (a euphemism used by the Nazis for the rounding-up of political opponents).

After World War II, Dor stayed in Austria, studying drama and Romance languages at the University of Vienna until 1949 while working as a German writing journalist. From 1951, he was a member of the literary association Group 47. He was also a member of the Austrian PEN Club and president of the Austrian Writers Federation. Dor lived in Vienna and at times in Rovinj with his second wife, with whom he had been married since 1955, until her death in 2002. His son is the Austrian film-maker Milan Dor.

Milo Dor died early on December 5, 2005 from heart failure in a hospital in Vienna and was interred in an honorary grave at the Zentralfriedhof.

Milo Dor wrote historical novels dealing with Yugoslavian and European history, essays criticising nationalism in Yugoslavia, crime fiction, news coverages, screenplays and radio dramas, edited documentaries and anthologies and translated Serbo-Croatian literature into German. Authors he translated include Ivo Andri?, Isaak Babel, Bogdan Bogdanovi?, Stephen Crane, Du?an Kova?evi?, Miroslav Krle?a, Branislav Nu?i?, Vasko Popa, Georges Simenon, Stanislav Vinaver, and Milovan Vitezovi?. Beginning in the 1950s, he wrote numerous books in cooperation with Reinhard Federmann.

Dor's best known work is The Raikow Saga, a trilogy consisting of Tote auf Urlaub [Dead men on leave], Nichts als Erinnerung [Nothing but memories], and Die weiße Stadt [The white town]. The hero of these novels is the autobiographically coloured figure Mladen Raikow.

The following of his books are available in English: