Funeral of Bosnian intellectual and writer Melika Salihbeg Bosnawi today

The funeral of Melika Salihbeg Bosnawi will be held today at 5 PM at the "Ravne Bakije" cemetery in Sarajevo. The prominent Bosnian intellectual and writer passed away yesterday at the age of 73.

She was born in 1945 in Sarajevo during the rule of the Independent State of Croatia. She completed elementary school and the First Classical Gymnasium in her hometown, and at the University of Zagreb, she studied at the Faculty of Political Science, simultaneously following studies in Philosophy and Comparative Literature for a time. She continued her postgraduate studies in Contemporary Philosophy, which she enrolled in at the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, with free research as a scholarship holder of the French government at the faculties of Université Paris-X, Nanterre and Collège de France, Quartier Latin, Paris. She dedicated a one-year scholarship to working on her master's thesis titled "Ontology of Modern Art".

A major transformation of her cognitive nature in 1978/79 soon brought her into conflict with the then-ruling political and spiritual system in ex-Yugoslavia, which would have lasting and far-reaching consequences for her life and work. Under the surname Salihbegović, she published her first essay in 1971 in the magazine "Izraz", and since then her literary career has been on a constant rise, also recording several awards at ex-Yu competitions (for film and TV scripts, newspaper stories).

She wrote and published poems, short stories, essays, scripts, translations, paraphrases, and political protests in Sarajevo, Zagreb, Belgrade, Ljubljana magazines and journals for literature and art... In the autumn of 1983, she was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison.

She was released on parole after a 73-day hunger strike. She was one of two women convicted in the so-called Sarajevo Process along with Alija Izetbegović, Omer Behmen, Edhem Bičakčić, Đula Bičakčić, Džemaludin Latić, Mustafa Spahić, and others. .