Goran Stefanovski

A radio play about Shakespeare, two TV plays with a contemporary setting, and a six-part TV series set in the 1940s followed Goran Stefanovski's early success in the second half of the 1970s.

Goran Stefanovski (Горан Стефановски; 27 April 1952 – 27 November 2018) was a leading Macedonian dramatist, screenwriter, essayist, lecturer and public intellectual.

He wrote for the theatre, television and film, as well as pursuing a long academic career in teaching creative writing for the theatre and film.

Born into a theatre family in Bitola, then in Yugoslavia, on 27 April 1952, Stefanovski had his first play performed at the age of 22.

Goran Stefanovski was born on 27 April 1952 in Bitola, a town then in Yugoslavia, near the border with Greece on the Balkan Peninsula in Eastern Europe.

His father, Mirko, was a theatre director and his mother, Nada, a leading actress.

Much of Goran's childhood was spent in theatres.

His younger brother is Vlatko Stefanovski (Влатко Стефановски), a well-known virtuoso guitarist.

Having fallen in love with all things English during his teenage years through the influence of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Goran went on to study English language and literature at the University of Skopje.

However, he could not get the theatre out of his system and spent his third year of studies at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts (FDU) in Belgrade.

He graduated as the best student of his generation in Skopje and took a job in the Drama Department of TV Skopje, although he was soon to return to the University to teach English literature, with a particular focus on Shakespeare.

In October 1974 he met Pat Marsh, an English linguist who came to teach English at Skopje University.

They married in March 14, 1976.

When they met, he was writing a play based on Macedonian folklore for Slobodan Unkovski (Слободан Унковски), one of the directors of a theatre group he had become involved with as a student; Unkovski was to become a lifetime collaborator and friend.

Yané Zadrogaz (Јане Задрогаз) achieved great success and went on to be presented at the Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF), then in Paris and finally at the Caracas Theatre Festival in Venezuela.

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In 1979 he wrote his best-known play, Wild Flesh (Диво месо), which has had fifteen productions to date all over Europe, including London, and is on the secondary school curriculum in his homeland.

The play is based on the experiences of his father and uncles during World War II.

Stefanovski is best known for his second play "Wild Flesh" (Диво месо), which won the 1980 Sterijino Pozorje Theatre Festival Award for Best Yugoslav Play of the Year and the same year earned him the 11th October Prize, the highest award of what was then the Republic of Macedonia.

He wrote 23 full-length plays for the theatre in all.

The most widely performed internationally are "Wild Flesh" (Диво месо), "Hi-Fi", "Flying on the Spot" (Лет во место), "Tattooed Souls" (Тетовирани души), "The Black Hole" (Црна дупка), "Chernodrinski Comes Back Home" (Чернодрински се враќа дома), "Sarajevo, an oratorio for the theatre", "Hotel Europa", and "The Demon of Debar Maalo" (Демонот од Дебар маало).

It brought him the October Prize of the Republic of Macedonia for exceptional artistic achievement, the highest award of the Republic, as well as the 1980 Award for Best Yugoslav Play of the Year at the Sterijino Pozorje Theatre Festival and was performed at the Belgrade International Theatre Festival.

Two years later, Flying on the Spot (Лет во место) had its first production, a play which dealt with the fraught Macedonian Question of the late nineteenth century and the identity of the nation.

Almost every year for the next thirty-three years was to see a new and successful play by Goran Stefanovski.

In the 1980s he continually pushed the boundaries of Yugoslav theatre, both in an artistic and political sense.

Stefanovski's son, Igor, had been born in 1980 and his daughter, Jana, was to be born in 1986.

The False Bottom (1983) (Дупло дно) was particularly bold in its challenge to state censors.

1985 marked a departure for the dramatist into a TV serial for children, The Crazy Alphabet (Бушава азбука), each episode teaching one of the 31 letters of the Macedonian alphabet through a combination of animation and sketches.

In 1987, Stefanovski wrote the first version of a screenplay for film director, Stolé Popov (Столе Попов), dealing with the aftermath of the catastrophic 1903 Ilinden Uprising against Ottoman rule.

In 1988 The Black Hole (Црна дупка) received its first productions; with its unique structure and stunning theatricality, it was considered to be an important contribution to European theatre.

In 1990, he took his family to Providence, Rhode Island, USA, where he spent six months as Outstanding Artist Fulbright Scholar at Brown University and began a lifelong friendship with Professor John Emigh.

In 1991, Yugoslavia began to fall apart and descended into civil war.

The constantly deteriorating situation led his wife Pat to decide to make a new life for the family in Canterbury, England, from September 1992.

For the next six years, Stefanovski was to commute between his homeland and the UK, continuing his teaching in Skopje.

That year he founded the playwriting department at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Skopje, where he was a full professor until 1998.

After the fall of Yugoslavia, he spent eight years commuting between what had become the Republic of Macedonia, the UK and Sweden, before settling in the UK in 2000.

He had dual Macedonian/UK citizenship.

Stefanovski's work dealt with issues of migration, post-communist transition and identity, as well as what it means to be human.

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This film, To the Hilt (До балчак), was not to be made until 2014, after it had been through two revisions, but it was the first of six screenplays Stefanovski was to write and began his involvement with film.