Biljana Jovanović

Biljana Jovanović (; 28 January 1953 – 11 March 1996) was a Yugoslav author of Montenegrin origin, peace activist, and feminist. She published poetry, novels and plays and was heavily involved in the peace movement during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

Life Jovanović was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, (now Serbia), on 28 January 1953. Her father was a Yugoslav Montenegrin Communist military official and politician, Batrić Jovanović, mother Olga Cetkovic was a journalist, and her brother Pavle was a jurist, professor at the University of Novi Sad. She graduated from the University of Belgrade with a degree in philosophy. She married the writer Dragan Lakićević while a student; they later divorced. In the late 1980s she married the Slovenian sociologist Rastko Močnik and they split their time between Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Belgrade. Jovanović died of a brain tumor in Ljubljana on 11 March 1996.

Work She published a book of poems in 1977, while still a student and followed it with a novel, Avala is Falling (Pada Avala), the following year. Jovanović published two more novels in the early 1980s, The Dogs and the Others (Psi i ostali) in 1980 and My Soul, My Only Child (Duša, jedinica moja) in 1984. Interspersed were four plays, two each in the 1980s and 1990s.

In Jovanović's novel Pada Avala, a young woman challenges the prevailing expectations that parents, teachers, doctors, bus drivers, and others have from her; representing a new character in the Yugoslav literary world at the time. Dogs and Others, her first novel published in full in English, deals with dysfunctional Yugoslavia, a society in existential crisis, caught between East and West, tradition and postmodernity. With her pioneering themes and style, Jovanović is now considered a major avant-garde writer.

Biljana Jovanović Award Biljana Jovanović Award was established in her honor by Srpsko književno društvo in 2005, and has been awarded annually since then. The recipients include Srdjan Valjarević, Danica Vukićević, Ibrahim Hadžic, Nemanja Mitrović, Uglješa Šajtinac, Jelena Lengold, among others.