[1] She grew up in city quarter Dorćol and was one of two daughters of Vladimir Velmar-Janković, appointed deputy minister of education of the Government of National Salvation in the German Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia, who escaped from Yugoslavia in September 1944.
In the meantime, she edited Prosveta's publication series Baština (Heritage) which consists of prose and essays of numerous Serbian authors.
Svetlana Velmar-Janković was married twice, her first marriage to journalist Miodrag Protić ended with his death in 1974, after twenty one years of wedlock, and her son Đorđe (born in 1966) comes from this relationship, he emigrated to the United States of America.
[5][6][7] In its obituary, the newspaper Politika cites the deceased lady once again who will never be passed away in collective memory and lives on in her books about places, people and generations.
Internationally best known book from her complete work is the novel Lagum, which has also been published in Bulgarian, English (two editions in 1996 and 2002), French, German, Italian and Spanish translation.
When her husband, the well-respected Dušan Pavlović, tried to save as many people as possible from the Ustashe extermination camps in the Independent State of Croatia during the war and therefore co-operated with Serbian Quisling government, the couple became increasingly estranged.
The takeover of power by the communist resistance fighters become the fate of the family: Dušan is executed as a collaborator, the apartment is ransacked by neighbors who hastily turned into zealous and cruel henchmen of the new regime.
Tracing the life of a middle-class woman whose husband was executed by the communist authorities, and who is obliged after 1945 to live with her two children in a small part of their large flat in Belgrade, it reveals the complex misunderstandings and false perceptions resulting from social divisions, resentments, and revolution.
Many possible examples could illustrate this, but only two are briefly presented here: an excerpt from her speech during the 1991 protests including the beginning of the Yugoslav wars and her statement about the Serbian declaration on Srebrenica massacre.
[13]I can only say that once again the opportunity to clearly condemn what has been done to Non-Serbs, thousands of human beings in Srebrenica, has been missed to have the moral right to speak tomorrow about what to the Serbian population happened in the 1990s.