Biljana Srbljanović

Biljana Srbljanović winner of The Statuette of Joakim Vujić

Biljana Srbljanović (Serbian pronunciation: [bǐʎana sr̩bʎǎːnoʋitɕ], Serbian Cyrillic: Биљана Србљановић, born 15 October 1970 in Stockholm, Sweden, now claiming Belgrade, Serbia) is a Serbian playwright and politician.

She has written seven plays for the theater and one TV screenplay for Otvorena vrata TV series that ran on Radio Television of Serbia during the mid-1990s. Her plays have been staged in some 50 countries. Srbljanović is also a part-time lecturer at the Faculty of the Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. On 1 December 1999 she became the first foreign writer to receive the Ernst Toller prize. She is the recipient of various theatre awards, including the Slobodan Selenić Award, the Osvajanje Slobode Award, the Belgrade City Award, The Statuette of Joakim Vujić and the Sterija Award.

Biography

Srbljanović obtained her dramaturgy degree in 1995 at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. The first play she wrote, Beogradska trilogija (The Belgrade Trilogy), was first performed in 1997 in Belgrade, Serbia at the Yugoslav Drama Theater. After its huge success, the play was produced in many other countries, including Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, England, and the Scandinavian countries.

In April 1998 her second play, Porodične priče (Family Stories), was written in Belgrade and staged at Atelje 212. It won the Best New Play Award at the theatre festival in Novi Sad, Serbia and was later staged in Germany, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, United States, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France and elsewhere.

In December 1999, Srbljanovic completed The Fall, which premiered in July 2000 at the City Theater Festival in Budva, Montenegro. Due to lack of public interest, the play was quickly erased from the program of Belgrade`s theaters.

The premiere of Supermarket, her fourth play, took place in May 2001 at the Festival of Vienna, Austria. It is still staged in many European countries.

In late 2003, Srbljanović completed her fifth play, America, Part Two. This became Serbia's most popular play in 2003 and 2004.

Srbljanović's next play, Skakavci (Locusts), won the New Theatrical Realities Award, one of Europe's most prominent theatre awards. In the 2005-06 season, German theater magazine Theater Heute proclaimed Srbljanović the best foreign playwright of the season.

Her latest play is Barbelo.

Since 2007 she has been a member of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), with an additional role as a member of the party's political council. Srbljanović was LDP's candidate for mayor of Belgrade in the Serbian local elections, 2008. She has distanced herself from the party afterwards.

In February 2012, Srbljanović was arrested in Belgrade for possession of cocaine.

Controversies

Apart from her writing career, Biljana Srbljanović is an outspoken figure and as such very prominent in Serbian public life. She is known for frequently speaking up on various political topics, as well as for railing against what she views to be "the irresponsibility of the political elite in Serbia", "Serbian violent nationalism" and "the culture of violence and exclusion in Serbian daily life".http://www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=500496 Some even go so far as to view her work as largely stemming from her political and moral outrage at the situation in Serbia over the last few decades.

Since May 2006, she maintains her own blog on the B92.net site [1] where among other things she frequently criticises various individuals, mostly Serbian right wing politicians and other figures who publicly display political conservativism and clericalism.

Personal

In 2006 she married the former French ambassador in Serbia Gabriel Keller.