3 December 2011
Saturday's Poem: Shrinking as they rise, the..." by Len Roberts, from Counting the Black Angels. Saturday's Literary Notes: Today is the birthday of Bosnian writer Zlata Filipovic, born in Sarajevo in 1980. Someone gave her a journal when she was 10, and she had recently read Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and The Diary of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend, so she decided she'd keep a diary too. The following year, she found herself in the middle of the Bosnian war, which broke out in April 1992, and her diary became much more "Anne Frank" than "Adrian Mole." That summer, word got out that UNICEF was looking for children's diaries to publish, so she sent them the first three months' entries. Foreign journalists spread the word, and the Filipovic family was evacuated to Paris. The complete text of her journal was eventually published as Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo (1993). Now 31, she has a master's degree in international peace studies. She recently co-edited the book Stolen Voices: Young People's War Diaries from World War I to Iraq (2006)...
Dec. 03, 2011: The Writer's Almanac • Opuss № I