Svetlana Velmar-Janković

Svetlana Velmar-Janković (Cyrillic: Светлана Велмар-Јанковић; born February 1, 1933 in Belgrade ; † April 9, 2014 ibid) was a Serbian writer and journalist. She was one of the most influential Serbian authors of her time.

Career

During her studies, the daughter of the Serbian author Vladimir Velmar-Janković began working as a journalist. In 1959 she got a job at the Belgrade Prosveta Verlag as a lecturer for contemporary Yugoslav prose and essay collections. After working as an editor and editor in the publishing house, Velmar-Janković became a member of the publishing board in 1971, and since 1989 she has worked as a freelance writer. Until 2003 she was a member of the Komisije za istinu i pomirenje (Commission for Truth and Reconciliation). Most recently, Velmar-Janković lived in Belgrade - the city that is the focus of most of her publications.

For her work she received the NIN literature prize and the literature prize of the politician zabavnik .

Her work has been published by Stubovi kulture in Belgrade and has been translated into English, French, Spanish, Italian, Bulgarian, Korean and Hungarian. The novel "Lagum" was published in German. The novel, published in Serbia in 1990 , deals with the political upheavals in Belgrade in the 1940s and the changes in the population under the new conditions. The focus of the text is the life of the eighty-year-old Milica Pavlović, who remembers the upheavals in Yugoslavia during the Second World War . Velmar-Janković wrote this novel intermittently for almost 20 years and discarded numerous versions before she completed it in the late 1980s. In “Lagum” Velmar-Janković not only refers to real political personalities from the post-war period, but also to the life of her father using the figure of a professor. Vladimir Velmar-Janković, who was a member of the Serbian government during the German occupation of Serbia in the early 1940s, fled to Italy towards the end of World War II to avoid conviction for collaboration. Reflecting on these incidents made “Lagum” her most personal novel.

Publications

• Ožiljak (1956)
• Savremenici ( Prosveta , Belgrade 1967), Isidora Sekulić Prize
• Dorcol (1981)
• Lagum (1990), German: Lagum. Novel. Translated from the Serbian by Mirjana and Klaus Wittmann. Frankfurt am Main: Edition Büchergilde, 2003.
• Ukletnici (1993)
• Vracar (1994)
• Knez Mihailo (1994)
• Bezdno (1995)
• Glasovi (1997)
• Knjiga za Marka (1998)
• Svetilnik (1998)
• Nigdina (2000)
• Žezlo (2001)
• Prozraci (2003)
• Ocarane Naocari (2006)

Web links

• Literature by and about Svetlana Velmar-Janković in the catalog of the German National Library