Zlata Filipović

Zlata Filipović
a 1995 edition of Zlata's Diary
Born	(1980-12-03) 3 December 1980 (age 36) Sarajevo, Yugoslavia (present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer
Ethnicity	Bosnian

Zlata Filipović (born 3 December 1980) is a Bosnian writer and author of Zlata's Diary.

The only child of an advocate and a chemist, Filipović grew up in a middle-class family. She was an honor student, with ambitions to become a journalist. From 1991-93, she wrote in her diary, Mimmy, about the horrors of the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, through which she lived.

Filipović and her family survived and escaped to Paris, in 1993 where they stayed for a year. She attended St. Andrew's College, Dublin (a senior school), going on to graduate from the University of Oxford in 2001 with a BA in human sciences, and has lived in Dublin, Ireland since October 1995, where she studied at Trinity College Dublin.

Filipović has continued to write. She wrote the foreword to The Freedom Writers Diary and co-edited Stolen Voices: Young People's War Diaries, From World War I to Iraq. She appeared on the French talk show Tout le monde en parle on 19 November 2006. She currently lives in Dublin, and works in the field of documentary and other film production.

In 2011, she produced the short film Stand Up! for the Stand Up! campaign created by BeLonG To, an LGBTQ youth service organisation in Ireland against homophobic bullying in schools. It has been viewed over 1.6 million times on YouTube.

She served on the Executive Committee of Amnesty International Ireland (2007-2013) and is a founding member of NYPAW (Network of Young People Affected by War) She has spoken extensively at schools and universities around the world on issues of children in conflict. She was a member of the UNESCO Jury for the Prize for Children and Young People's Literature for Tolerance. She is a recipient of the Child of Courage Award by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles (1994).