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Jelena Djurovic was born in Belgrade on Friday, 13th July, 1973. The
only child of Vukasin and Svetlana.She grew up in a liberal enviroment
and
from the very beginning showed very little interest in anything except
books, movies and music. When she was 11 years old, mother introduced
her to the family's past. She gave little Jelena the Nobel prize winning
book "Bridge over river Drina" by Ivo Andric. Some of the characters
in the book were Jews, Ashkenazi from Tarnov, Poland, families Apfelmaier
and Sperling. Mother explained that Lotika Apfelmaier, owner of the "Hotel
zur Brucke" was Jelena’s great-grandmother. The following year, the author
got her Magen David, which she owned ever since. Also, long summers at
her father's family's house in Montenegro played an important role in
her growing up. Diverse influences didn't cause any confusion, on the
contrary.
Miss Djurovic's first literary influence was the American author Bret Easton
Ellis. She read his book "Less than zero" when she was in her last year
of elementary school, and inspired her to start writing herself. In July
1989. she read "Atlantis" by the late Serbian author Borislav Pekic. This
book hit her so hard that she started writing her first book (never published),
a cheesy espionage thriller "Summer of the dragons". Still, "Atlantis"
remained her favorite book of all time.
At the end of the same year, with one of the first copies of Umberto Eco's
book "Foucault's pendulum" she entered her bedroom and didn't came out
for four days untill she had read the very last sentence "It is so beautiful".
Three books, with almost nothing in common, defined her life and writing.
After an unsucesfull adventure at the Faculty of Political Sciences, in
June 1995, she entered the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, from which she graduated
in September 2002, as a theatre and radio producer. From 1996, she worked
as a producer, organizer and coordinator for some of the most important
theaters in Belgrade. During this time, she was witness to hypocrisy and
nepotism of gigantic proportions, leading her to quit working for theatres
in Serbia. At the beginning of 1999, Miss Djurovic started writing her
first book, entitled "Kingdom". She gets big support from her irreplacable
childhood friend, former local "wunderkind", writer and playwright Miomir
Petrovic.
In June 2001, she sent the fifth chapter of the then unfinished "Kingdom"
to the publishing house "Zayupress", from USA. This chapter was, a year
later, published in a book called "Balkan Anthology : Voices from the faultline".
In September 2002, her graduate work recieved an unusually low grade –
eight. This 250-page text, entitled "Stage in the shadow of gibbet – The
biggest theatres in Belgrade from 1990. to 1995.", was controversial not
only for its name but also for its content (The work concerns situations
and scandals in the most important theatres in Serbia during the Milosevic
era, and the reflection of political events on cultural policy). In some
right-wing circles on Faculty this work has been considered "anti-Serbian".
But the most important reviews came Zrom experts in theatre criticism and theory,
Ivan Medenica and Ksenija Radulovic, who published part of this work in
the Autumn issue of an influential magazine for theatre theory "Teatron".
Her next book is a biography of Adolf Hitler, which deals with attitude
of this infamous man towards religion and phenomenon of evil.
