Jovan Ilieski
Jovan Ilieski is a graduate psychologist and Gestalt psychotherapist, a writer by vocation and a storyteller at heart. Drawn to the extraordinary stories hidden within everyday life, he creates literature in which the human, the fragile, and the impossible intertwine.
He has been writing since the age of seven. He published his first public work in 2012, under a pseudonym, on the blog “A Soul on a Piece of Paper.” He later collaborated with the publishing houses Matica and Kultura, and is now an exclusive author of Antolog. His short prose has also been published in Balkanski Književni Glasnik.
He is the author of seven novels, including My Father, Bosphorus, his “dearest child,” which was translated into Turkish and published in Ankara by Karina under the title Babam, Boğaziçi.
He has received several national awards and has more than ten sold-out print runs behind him. He says he will keep writing for as long as he breathes.
Seven Fifty
Antolog, Skopje, 2024
What if, overnight, the reason for the millennia-long struggle between christianity and islam were to disappear?
Asli is the wife of Ishtar Azim, desperate to fulfill herself in the role of a mother. Ishtar still cannot come to terms with the death of his sister, and her spirit is the reason behind their troubled marriage. He is now recognized throughout the country and beyond. His only published book has broken all readership records.
Unexpectedly, before winter arrives, at seven fifty, Istanbul is shadowed by the greatest tragedy in its history. As the government struggles to save the city from the ashes, questions from the past begin to resurface. The truth about the dead Osman Jalal, the details revealed in the published novel, the disappearance of the girls from the shore, and one of the deepest-buried secrets beneath the underground of Byzantion.
Seven Fifty is a sequel, interweaving the city’s two polar opposites — the Istanbul elite and the abyss of the Marmara Sea, where the organ trade is born. As well as the Vatican’s secret relic, thousands of years old, buried beneath the waves of the Bosphorus. A rich, revelatory conclusion to the myth of Kamila Jalal, which in itself raises historical questions to which this novel offers a delicate answer.