GORAN STEFANOVSKI was born on 27 April 1952 in Bitola, a town then in Yugoslavia, near the border with Greece on the Balkan Peninsula in Eastern Europe, now in North Macedonia. His father, Mirko, was a theatre director and his mother, Nada, a leading actress. Much of Goran’s childhood was spent in theaters.

During his teenage years he was heavily influenced by the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and went on to study English language and literature at the University of Skopje. However, the theater was in his blood. Goran was to spend his third year of studies at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts (FDU) in Belgrade and have his first play performed at the age of 22. It was directed by Slobodan Unkovski, who was to become a lifetime collaborator and friend.

Goran Stefanovski wrote 23 full-length plays for the theater in all. The most widely performed internationally are Wild Flesh, Hi-Fi, Flying on the Spot, Tattooed Souls, The Black Hole, Chernodrinski Comes Back Home, Sarajevo, an Oratorio for the Theater, Hotel Europa, and The Demon of Debar Maalo.

In 1990 he spent six months as an Outstanding Artist Fulbright Scholar at Brown University, in rhode Island, and began a lifelong friendship with Professor John Emigh.

In 1991 Yugoslavia began to fall apart and descended into civil war. The constantly deteriorating situation led his English wife, Pat Marsh, to decide to make a new life for the family in Canterbury, England, from September 1992. For the next six years, Stefanovski was to commute between his homeland and the UK, continuing his teaching in Skopje.

In 1992, Chris Torch of the Jordcirkus theatre group in Stockholm commissioned Goran to write a play for the Antwerp European Capital of Culture, about Sarajevo, the Bosnian city then undergoing a brutal siege. This successful venture was followed by performance scripts for the festivals of European Capitals of Culture in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Avignon, and Bologna, all in collaboration with Chris Torch.

In September 2000 Stefanovski settled in Canterbury and taught classes in screenwriting and playwriting at the University of Kent before taking up his post at Canterbury Christ Church University in 2002, teaching screenwriting there until his death in 2018. He wrote six screenplays in all and his A Little Book of Traps (a scriptwriting tool) has been translated and published in five languages, including Chinese.

Goran Stefanovski continued writing successful plays which were translated and produced all over the world throughout the rest of his life. He died of an inoperable brain tumor in 2018 at the age of 66.