Biljana Srbljanović

Srbljanović was born on 15 October 1970 in Stockholm as a daughter of a member of the Yugoslav embassy diplomatic staff. In 2010, she made a speech at the Akademietheater in Vienna, where she described her father as an emigrant, but this information is more than questionable in view of a member and political representative of an embassy. The wrong indication of Belgrade as the place of birth was obviously made public by herself at the beginning of her career. This false information is to be read again and again in some online biographies on her person.[1][2][3]

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 premiered in 1997 in Belgrade, Serbia at the Yugoslav Drama Theater. After its huge success, the play was staged 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, Srbljanović 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 young artist can also be seen in the Serbian movie Land of Truth, Love and Freedom (Zemlja istine ljubavi i slobode) as an actress in a leading role.[4]

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.[5]

Her latest play This Grave Is Too Small For Me has attracted international press attention as well as acclaim from various audiences in Europe.[6]

In 2007 Srbljanović joined the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), with an additional role as a member of the party's political council.[7] Srbljanović was LDP's candidate for mayor of Belgrade in the 2008 Serbian local elections. She has distanced herself from the party afterwards.

Srbljanović has for decades been an outspoken figure in the Serbian public sphere.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, during her university days, Srbljanović was a close friend of Isidora Bjelica and wrote for the right-wing Pogledi magazine.[8]

By mid-1990s, Srbljanović's political views swung to the left as she began fiercely opposing the policies of Slobodan Milošević as well as views held by individuals and parties in the Serbian political opposition on the right side of the political spectrum. In 1997, as one of the guests on Olja Bećković's Utisak nedelje talk programme on Studio B, Srbljanović squared off against her former Pogledi editor-in-chief Miloslav Samardžić over the issue of American magnate George Soros injecting funds into the pro-Western Serbian media outlets, primarily B92.[9]

Even after the 5 October 2000 Overthrow in Serbia, she continued railing against what she viewed to be "the irresponsibility of the political elite in Serbia", "Serbian violent nationalism" and "the culture of violence and exclusion in Serbian daily life". From May 2006 until February 2009, she maintained her own blog on the B92.net site[10] where among other things she frequently criticized various individuals, mostly Serbian politicians and other public figures who displayed political opinions she opposes such as Nebojša Krstić, adviser to the Serbian president Boris Tadić.

In 2010 Srbljanović opened a Twitter account where she continued commenting on Serbian politics. During late summer 2011, she got into several heated exchanges with the Democratic Party (DS) spokeswoman Jelena Trivan.[11][12]

The artist is signatory of the Declaration on the Common Language of the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins within the project Languages and Nationalisms (Jezici i nacionalzmi).[13] The declaration is against political separation of four Serbo-Croatian standard variants that leads to a series of negative social, cultural and political phenomena in which linguistic expression is enforced as a criterion of ethno-national affiliation and as a means of political loyalty in successor states of Yugoslavia.[14]

In March 2001, Srbljanović was sued for libel by film director Emir Kusturica as a result of calling him "an immoral Milošević's profiteer" in her op-ed piece in the Vreme magazine.[15] She further claimed in the same piece that Kusturica's 1995 film Underground was mostly financed by the Serbian state-owned TV (RTS), which was financially and editorially controlled by Milošević's regime at the time, accusing the director of "directly collaborating with the regime via his friend Milorad Vučelić".[16] In December 2003, the Belgrade municipal court ruled in Kusturica's favour as her claims couldn't stand up to closer scrutiny after Kusturica's attorney Branislav Tapušković provided a complete documentation of Underground producers and financiers thus proving that funding mostly came from the European production companies while parts of the movie were only shot in Serbian studios.[17]

In July 2007 Srbljanović criticized basketball player Milan Gurović on her blog, referring to him as "that tattooed idiot", for having a tattoo of World War II Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović on his arm.[18]

Additionally, Srbljanović aroused controversy with her 18 February 2012 tweet referring to the news item about former Serbian interior minister Dragan Jočić getting extra police security following the arrest of a gangster Luka Bojović. Srbljanović's tweet — "'Jočić getting extra security detail' why? he ain't gonna run" — mocked the fact Jočić is physically disabled ever since his 2008 car accident.[19]

Srbljanović set off a torrent of negative sentiment from the general public in Serbia after making an awkward joke during the catastrophic May 2014 floods on Twitter. The tweet in Serbian read "Excuse me for not being compassionate, but you have 10 more minutes to swim to the gallery for the promotion of the book Tomato". A flurry of tweets, Facebook posts and news updates were quick to condemn the post, and her Twitter account @leyakeller became unavailable not long after [20]

In January 2019, Srbljanović got into a vicious online exchange with actor and newly appointed Movement of Free Citizens (PSG) leader Sergej Trifunović whom she had previously collaborated with professionally in addition to an overlap in their respective studies at the University of Arts' Faculty of Dramatic Arts (FDU). Responding to Trifunović's tweet about her early 1990s right-wing views and activist activity,[21] Srbljanović launched into an obscenity-laced, insult-laden tirade on her Facebook account, eviscerating his morality, professionalism, personal hygiene, and accusing him of responsibility in the murder of Zoran Đinđić.[22][23][24][25] Serbian actress and film producer Bojana Maljević, who has also had a prior professional history with Srbljanović, supported the veracity of the event referenced in Trifunović's original tweet.[26][27]

In 2006 Srbljanović married Gabriel Keller, former French ambassador in Serbia. They got divorced in 2014.[28] Srbljanović is related to Radovan Karadžić, wartime political leader of Bosnian Serbs, sentenced to 40 years in prison by the international tribunal at The Hague.[29][30]

• Culture of Serbia
• This Grave Is Too Small For Me