Flora Brovina is a Kosovar Albanian

Albanians in Kosovo

Albanians are the largest ethnic group in Kosovo . According to the 1991 Serbian census, boycotted by Albanians, there were 1,596,072 ethnic Albanians in Kosovo or 81.6% of population...

 poet, pediatrician and women’s rights activist. She was born in the town of Srbica in the Drenica

Drenica

Drenica also known as the Drenica Valley, is a hilly region in central Kosovo, covering . Located west of the capital Prishtina, its population of 110,000 is largely ethnic-Albanian....

 Valley of Kosovo

Kosovo

Kosovo is a region in southeastern Europe. Part of the Ottoman Empire for more than five centuries, later the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija within Serbia...

, and was raised in Pristina

Pristina

Pristina, also spelled Prishtina and Priština is the capital and largest city of Kosovo. It is the administrative centre of the homonymous municipality and district....

, where she went to school and began studying medicine. After finishing her university studies in Zagreb

Zagreb

Zagreb is the capital and the largest city of the Republic of Croatia. It is in the northwest of the country, along the Sava river, at the southern slopes of the Medvednica mountain. Zagreb lies at an elevation of approximately above sea level. According to the last official census, Zagreb's city...

, where she specialized in pediatrics, she returned to Kosovo and worked for a time as a journalist for the Albania

Albanian language

Albanian is an Indo-European language spoken by approximately 7.6 million people, primarily in Albania and Kosovo but also in other areas of the Balkans in which there is an Albanian population, including western Macedonia, southern Montenegro, southern Serbia and northwestern Greece...

n-language daily newspaper Rilindja. Soon thereafter, she returned to the health care profession and worked for many years in the Pediatrics Ward of the Pristina General Hospital.

Kosovo war

As the political situation in Kosovo deteriorated in the 1990s, and fighting broke out, Brovina ran a health clinic in Pristina in which she distributed health care information on matters as diverse as snake bites, dressing wounds and delivering babies. She also used the centre to shelter a number of orphaned children, many of whom had lost their parents during the fighting and expulsions. She and her fellow workers took care of as many as 25 children at a time.

On 20 April 1999 during the Kosovo War

Kosovo War

The term Kosovo War or Kosovo conflict was two sequential, and at times parallel, armed conflicts in Kosovo province, then part of FR Yugoslav Republic of Serbia; from early 1998 to 1999, there was an armed conflict initiated by the ethnic Albanian "Kosovo Liberation Army" , who sought independence...

, Brovina was abducted by eight masked Serb paramilitaries from the home she was staying in and was driven off by car to an initially unknown destination. She was thus in captivity in Serbia when NATO forces took the capital and Serb troops withdrew from the country. The first news of her abduction broke on 24 April 1999 when her son managed to contact the international writers’ association, PEN

International PEN

PEN International , the worldwide association of writers, was founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere....

, with an urgent appeal that the news of her abduction be made known as widely as possible. She was transferred to a Serb prison in Požarevac

Požarevac

Požarevac is a city and municipality in eastern Serbia. It is the administrative center of the Braničevo District of Serbia...

 and, in her first month of detention, was subjected to over 200 hours of interrogation in 18 separate sessions lasting typically from 7 A.M. to 5 P.M. On 9 December 1999, in a show trial, she was accused of 'terrorist activities' under Article 136 of the Yugoslav Penal Code. She spent a year and a half in Serb prisons before being released as a result of international pressure.

Writing

As a writer, Flora Brovina is the author of three volumes of lyric verse. The first collection, Verma emrin tim (Call me by my name), containing 42 verses, was published in Pristina in 1973 when she was a mere twenty-four years old. Six years later, in 1979, the collection Bimë e zë (Plant and voice) followed. It is in this collection that some of the main themes of Brovina’s poetry crystallize. Conspicuous among them is the fate of women in society, and in particular the role of women as mothers, as life-givers and nurturers. It is here that births, umbilical cords, amniotic fluid and suckling breasts begin to make their appearance. Along with plants, these are perhaps the most ubiquitous symbols of her verse production. Her third and last collection of original verse, entitled Mat e çmat (With the tape it measures), was published in Pristina in 1995. Mat e çmat appeared at a time when Kosovo was obviously gravitating towards war. Though this third collection cannot be interpreted as political verse to any great extent, there are many poems in the volume which reflect her preoccupation not only with the problems and aspirations of individuals, but also with the fate of her people, with freedom and self-determination.

In 1999, Flora Brovina was recipient of the annual Tucholsky Award of the Swedish PEN Club, a prize which has been awarded to other writers of note such as Salman Rushdie, Adam Zagajevski, Nuruddin Farah

Nuruddin Farah

Nuruddin Farah is a prominent Somali novelist.-Early years:Born in Baidoa, Somalia, Farah is the son of a merchant father and a poet mother. As a child, he attended school at Kallafo in the Ogaden, and studied English, Arabic, and Amharic. In 1963, three years after Somalia's independence, Farah...

, Taslima Nasrin

Taslima Nasrin

Taslima Nasrin is a Bengali Bangladeshi ex-doctor turned author who has been living in exile since 1994. From a modest literary profile in the late 1980s, she rose to global fame by the end of the 20th century owing to her feminist views and her criticism of Islam in particular and of religion in...

, Shirali Nurmuadov and Vincent Magombe. She is also the recipient of the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award

PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award

The PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award honours writers anywhere in the world who have fought courageously in the face of adversity for the right to freedom of expression....

 by PEN American Center

PEN American Center

PEN American Center , founded in 1922 and based in New York City, works to advance literature, to defend free expression, and to foster international literary fellowship. The Center has a membership of 3,300 writers, editors, and translators...

 and the Human Rights Award of the Heinrich Böll Foundation

Heinrich Böll Foundation

The Heinrich Böll Foundation is a German, legally independent political foundation. Affiliated with the German Green Party, it was originally founded in 1987 and rebuilt in 1997...

 in Berlin.

Despite this international recognition, it is curious to note that, as a poet, Flora Brovina has never been part of the literary establishment of Kosovo, nor has her verse found its way into the mainstream of contemporary Albanian literature. A collection of her verse has appeared in English in "Flora Brovina, Call me by my Name, Poetry from Kosova" in a bilingual Albanian-English Edition, translated by Robert Elsie

Robert Elsie

Robert Elsie is a scholar who specializes in Albanian literature and folklore.- Life :Born on June 29, 1950 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Elsie studied at the University of British Columbia, graduating in 1972 with a diploma in Classical Studies and Linguistics...

, New York: Gjonlekaj 2001.

Her youngest sibling Ilir Brovina, born in Pristina, helped figure this crises out. He now lives in America with his family.