The Penguin Speakers Bureau

Zlata Filipovic was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1980. At the age of ten, she started keeping a diary, which, when conflict began in the former Yugoslavia, became a record of the war and survival in her city. Zlata’s Diary was published first in France in 1993 and was an instant international bestseller. It has since been translated into thirty-six languages and is required reading in many schools around the world.

She holds a BA in human sciences from Oxford University and an M.Phil in international peace studies from Trinity College Dublin. She has spoken extensively at schools and universities around the world and has worked on many occasions with organizations such as the Anne Frank House, the UN, and UNICEF. She is also a three-time member of the UNESCO Jury for Children’s and Young People’s Literature Prize for Tolerance.

Her written work includes contributions to several books, radio programs and newspapers, including a foreword for The Freedom Writers Diary (Doubleday, 1997) and the English translation of Milosevic: The People’s Tyrant (I.B. Tauris, 2004), for which she has also written a foreword. More recently, she has co-edited Stolen Voices: Young People’s War Diaries from WWI to Iraq (Penguin, 2006).

She recently worked within the UN Children and Armed Conflict Division in New York under Olara Otunnu and is collaborating with Amnesty International USA on developing human rights education material based around her most recent book, Stolen Voices.

Zlata now serves on the executive committee of Amnesty International Ireland and is currently making documentary films.