Goran Stefanovski

Goran Stefanovski (Macedonian: 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.

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).

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. 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.

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.

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

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. Stefanovski's son, Igor, had been born in 1980 and his daughter, Jana, was to be born in 1986. That year he founded the playwriting department at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Skopje, where he was a full professor until 1998.

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. 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.

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.

In 1992, Dragan Klaić, one of Goran's former teachers at the Belgrade Faculty of Dramatic Arts and a close friend, put him in touch with Chris Torch of the Jordcirkus theatre group in Stockholm, who commissioned a play, in cooperation with the Antwerp European Capital of Culture, about Sarajevo, the Bosnian city then undergoing a brutal siege. Sarajevo, an oratorio for the theatre went on an extensive tour across Europe in the summer of 1993, including the London International Festival of Theatre and the Kampnagel International Summer Festival in Hamburg. Sarajevo was published in London, New York, and Illinois. This successful venture was followed by performance scripts for the festivals of European Capitals of Culture in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Avignon, and Bologna, all in collaboration with Chris Torch.

Through this connection, Stefanovski had become known in Sweden and between 1998 and 2000 he was a visiting professor at the Swedish Institute of Dramatic Art in Stockholm. The Institute published his A Little Book of Traps (a scriptwriting tool) in 2002. It has been translated and published in five languages, including Chinese. By this time, Stefanovski had become used to writing in English and only later translating his work into his mother tongue.

In September 2000, he settled in Canterbury and taught classes in screenwriting and playwriting at the University of Kent before taking up his post at Canterbury Christ Church University in 2002, teaching screenwriting there until his death in 2018.

Stefanovski continued writing successful plays which were translated and produced all over the world throughout the rest of his life. In 2004 Everyman played at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith and on tour with Theatre Mélange. Perhaps the most notable of his later plays were his two adaptations of Ancient Greek texts, Bacchanalia after Euripides' The Bacchae and Odysseus after Homer's Odyssey. Both had clear references to the Yugoslav wars and their aftermath. Several of his post-war plays "approach from different angles themes like alienation, wandering and home-longing, experimenting, at the same time, with the itinerant performance, aimed to explore a labyrinthine space".

Goran Stefanovski died of an inoperable brain tumour in 2018 at the age of 66.

Goran Stefanovski was born and brought up under the communist regime in Yugoslavia. While doing his military service in 1977-78 he was made a member of the Yugoslav Communist Party and assigned to teach classes in Marxism to his fellow conscripts. Particularly during communist times, he walked a tightrope between approval and disapproval by the powers-that-be. His views on political events were still constantly sought after the fall of communism. In the last year of his life, he wrote: "I'm not a politician. It's not my responsibility to take a side and have a prepared position on every issue. I'm a playwright. I'm interested in both the voice of the angel and the voice of the devil. I sympathise both with the darkest on the Right and the brightest on the Left".[10]

Goran Stefanovski also had a long academic career in his homeland and in the UK.[11] From 1975 to 1977 he did postgraduate studies at the Faculty of Philology, specialising in Literature Studies, and was awarded an MA in 1979 after presentation of his dissertation entitled "Stage Directions as the Foundation of the Theatre of Samuel Beckett".

For the 1979–1980 academic year he did research on contemporary British drama and Edward Bond at the University of Manchester, UK, with a 10-month scholarship from The British Council. This was to have led to a doctoral degree, but Stefanovski never completed it as creative writing came to hold a central position in his life and claimed the bulk of his time outside university teaching, which was his full-time career from 1978 onwards.

He taught a survey of English Literature with a strong emphasis on Shakespeare and Drama from 1978 to 1986 in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Skopje. From 1986 to 1995 he was an assistant professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, University of Skopje, and Head of the Playwriting Department, teaching Creative Playwriting, Theory of Drama and History of Drama – Shakespeare course. In the Spring semester of 1990, he was Fulbright Outstanding Artist Scholar at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, and taught an Introduction to Dramatic Writing in the Department of Theatre, Speech and Dance there.

He was promoted to Full Professor in his post in Skopje in 1995 and remained at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts until 1998. From 1998 to 2000 he was Visiting Professor at the Dramatic Institute, Stockholm, Sweden. Stefanovski then taught screenwriting and playwriting classes in the Departments of Film and Drama at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, between 2000 and 2002, before taking up the post he held until his death in 2018 as Senior Lecturer in Scriptwriting in the Department of Media and Art at Canterbury Christ Church University in 2002.

His A Little Book of Traps (a scriptwriting tool), published by Dramatic Institute in Stockholm in 2002, encapsulates his approach to playwriting and screenwriting as a craft which can be taught.[12] He was to develop this in various papers and essays.[13]

Stefanovski contributed papers to a large number of conferences and held workshops all over Europe.[14] He reported on his practice-based research of scriptwriting[15] and also on his research into issues of identity and cultural history, politics and policies.[16]

His last public lecture was as keynote speaker at the International Federation for Theatre Research World Congress in Belgrade in July 2018. His last public appearance was to receive an honorary doctorate from the Krastyo Sarafov National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia.

Goran Stefanovski's folders on each of his works with background material used and reviews, as well as much of his library of books, are held at the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences (МАНУ) in Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia. The Здружение Горан Стефановски Скопјe (Goran Stefanovski Foundation) protects and promotes his work internationally, as well as sponsoring aspiring young writers for the theatre and film and arts events. Applications to perform or publish his work in the Republic of North Macedonia should be made to Patent Centar in Skopje, or to Igor Stefanovski at the Goran Stefanovski Foundation to perform or publish his work elsewhere in the world.

Most of Goran Stefanovski's plays for the theatre were published in Macedonian in the four volumes of Собрани драми , Табернакул , Skopje ISBN 9989-937-21-4 (Книга прва – 2002: Јане Задрогаз, Диво месо, Лет во место, Хај-Фај, Дупло дно, Тетовирани души; ISBN 9989-937-22-2 (Книга втора – 2002: Црна дупка, Лонг плеј, Кула вавилонска, Чернодрински се враќа дома, Сараево, Баханалии, Kaзaбaлкан); ISBN 978-608-210-149-1 (Книга трета – 2010: Гоце, Екс-ју, Евроалиен, Хотел Eвропа, Жив чоек, Духот на слободата, Демонот од Дебар Mаало, Остави тоа!); ISBN 978-608-210-416-4 (Книга четврта – 2015: Одисеј, Огнени јазици, Figurae Veneris Historiae). These editions are now out of print.

Now available in Macedonian:

Available in translation:

Into Macedonian:

Into Chinese (Standard Mandarin):

Into Serbian:

Into Slovak: