Goran Stefanovski
Goran Stefanovski was born in 1952 in Bitola, Macedonia. He says that “if he was born again”, he would be making stage plays based on daily life rituals. “My grandmother’s wedding lasted three days. I’d love to make that kind of show.” He graduated in literature and English in Skopje, and in dramaturgy in Belgrade, obtaining an MA with a thesis on Beckett. He and his younger brother Vlatko belong to the first Macedonian cultural generation formed in the social conditions of an emancipated nation, a generation which skilfully crosses poetic and other boundaries thanks to a solid heritage of institutional and creative supplies from the heroic period. Primarily a writer, he penetrates the dramaturgical level of a story not only as an expert (the founder of the screenwriting department in Skopje and a professor at the University of Kent, but also as a media-aware, television author who adapted his own first famous drama Divlje meso into the language of film. Occupied with the relationship between good and evil, as Croatian Encyclopaedia states: “with the familial, social and moral decay in an expanse of time and a re-semantisation of mythical elements of traditional culture and subject matters from oral folklore literature.” And “to my grandfather’s generation, emigration was the same as muscle exercise,” he said, with an experience of an author whose plays are performed on stages all over the world without detaching from their original conceptual complex. His Odisej (2012) marked his way ‘back’ from Istria, from Brioni islands. This text “combines Homer’s epic, the downfall of Yugoslavia and aging. His Odysseus is a disillusioned warrior trying to return home, to his own life after the conflicts, who doubts in the existence of gods, re-examines the values he cares about and the notions of fidelity, dignity and honour.”