Priscilla Morris on the inspiration, research and real-life stories behind her debut novel BLACK BUTTERFLIES

Black Butterflies tells the story of Zora Kocovic, a 55-year-old landscape painter and teacher, during the first ten months of the Siege of Sarajevo. Separated from her husband and mother when violence breaks out, she must face the brutal shelling and blockade of her hometown alone. Deep friendships develop with her neighbours: Mirsad, a kind-hearted bookseller and storyteller; his son Samir, who must decide whether to defend his city or continue hiding; Lenka, a seventeen-year-old who’s desperate to find work; and spirited eight-year-old Una, whom Zora teaches how to paint. While Black Butterflies is harrowing in places, it is threaded with hope, strength and resilience.

My mother comes from Sarajevo, Bosnia. She left in the late 1960s, when it was still part of Yugoslavia, and came to live in London, where she married my English father. But most of her relatives, including her parents, were trapped in Sarajevo when war erupted in 1992. I was nineteen at the time. I remember my family watching the news each night in shocked disbelief, unable to make sense of the images of everyday people being shot by snipers as they crossed the street. The head post office and telephone exchange were blown up in the first month of the war and we had no way of contacting my grandparents.

In early 1993, my father bought a flak jacket and went out to rescue his parents-in-law. He spent three weeks in the freezing city without heating, electricity or running water before managing to secure them a way out. A stream of gaunt, chain-smoking refugee relatives passed through our South London home that year. Traumatised by continuous shelling, they jumped each time a door slammed.

Three decades later, Black Butterflies is my creative response to the war that displaced so many of my relatives. I wanted to gain some understanding of the brutal disintegration of my mother’s home country. My novel is, in many ways, a love letter to the warm, multicultural Sarajevo, where I spent many happy childhood summers.

While my father’s heroic rescue of my grandparents works its way in fictionalised form into the novel, the real catalyst for writing my debut was the inspirational story of my great-uncle, Dobrivoje Beljkašić. Dobri was a Sarajevan landscape painter, who loved to paint the elegant Ottoman bridges that span Bosnia’s fast-flowing rivers. He suffered great loss during the war when his studio above the National Library burnt down. His life’s work of over 300 paintings went up in flames that night, yet he used his artistic practice to help him rise above the destruction eventually. He inspired the character of Zora. His tale of art overcoming, or at least, mitigating the tragedy of war spoke deeply to me.

Dobri’s narrative of loss and renewal provided a hopeful way into a very dark period of history. I first heard his tale at my grandfather’s funeral when I was 26. My imagination was gripped by the image of art and books on fire. In fact, I tried writing his story in various forms – a newspaper article, a short story, even a children’s story – before finally settling on the novel form, while doing an MA in Creative Writing in 2009. Having wanted to write fiction since age six, when I fell in love with reading, and having written many unpublished stories, it was the natural choice. The length of a novel allowed me to give his war tale the depth and resonance that it needed and to bring in other stories and characters too.

Considerable research fed into the slim novel that ended up taking 13 years to write. Histories, documentaries, films, newspaper articles, collections of letters, memoirs, diaries and novels helped me to understand what happened when and gave me many specific details of life under siege. However, the most invaluable sources were the face-to-face interviews that I carried out with Sarajevans. I interviewed my great-uncle, his wife and his daughter multiple times in England in 2009. In 2010, I lived for five months in Sarajevo and listened to a dozen people who kindly shared their experiences of living through the siege. I also gained a great sense of the geography, sights, smells, and feel of the city. Place inspires me hugely as a writer.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was depressed on returning from Sarajevo. Weighed down by so much war, I was unable to write creatively for a year. I think it took me that long to digest what I’d heard and begin to alchemise it into fiction. Then the characters of Mirsad, Lenka and Una, all inspired by people I’d met, started to step out onto the page. Their memories, anecdotes and emotions are present and alive in the novel. It was around this time that the character of Zora emerged too. She came fully formed one afternoon: red-haired, warm, bold, humane, wanting to carve time into her busy life to make art. I knew she would be separated from her husband at the start of the war and that someone close to her would die. The rest I discovered as I wrote.

The real person behind Lenka was one of my first readers. She fact-checked and provided a sensitivity read. Sadly, Bosnia and Herzegovina is still a very divided place with several narratives of what “really happened” co-existing, so great sensitivity and care is needed. The real person behind Una lives in Berlin and loves the novel. My great-uncle Dobri died in 2015, having lived, painted and exhibited in Bristol, England, for the last two decades of his life. While sadly he never read the final version, he and his wife Gordana had read earlier drafts. He gave me his blessing to write his story and was fine, to my relief, with the switch of protagonist from male to female. He appreciated it was a novel first and foremost. Their daughter Dragana lives on in Bristol, looking after her father’s artist’s estate.

Finally, a note on the title. This came late in the writing process. My manuscript was provisionally titled The Painter of Bridges for many years, but it never sounded quite right. A photo that I had propped up on my desk while writing was of the shelled Bosnian National Library, flames billowing from its windows. Over two million books and documents were lost that night, plus three artists’ studios. The charred pages of books and art floated over Sarajevo for days. In real life, as well as in the book, people took to calling these ashes “black butterflies.”

Captions:

Black Butterflies, published by Knopf (Penguin Random House), August 2024 (Published in the UK by Duckworth in May 2022)

The FAMA Survival Map of the Siege of Sarajevo, 1992-1996

Dobrivoje Beljkašić at Priscilla’s family home in London,1993

“Memories of Sarajevo” by Dobrivoje Beljkašić, 1993. This was one of the first paintings my great-uncle Dobri painted after he, his wife and mother-in-law left Sarajevo on the last Red Cross Convoy out of the besieged city in November 1992.

Priscilla Morris by the Goat’s Bridge, near Sarajevo, in 2023. Zora paints this bridge obsessively.

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Priscilla Morris is a British author of Bosnian-Cornish parentage. She teaches creative writing, most recently at University College Dublin, and divides her time between Ireland and Spain. Her debut novel Black Butterflies was a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023 and four other prestigious awards. It is one of the New York Times’ Top 10 Best Historical Novels of 2024 and has been nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2025. You can read more at priscillamorris.org.

Additional Background on the Siege of Sarajevo

In 1992 Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from an increasingly Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, a country that had existed for most of the twentieth century. A bloody war followed.

Bosnia consisted of three ethno-national groups. In 1991, a little under half the population were Bosnian Muslims (known as Bosniaks after the war), a third were Bosnian Serbs, and one in five were Bosnian Croats. Bosnia was famed for its tradition of hospitality, tolerance and pluralism, but this seemingly disappeared overnight. The awful euphemism “ethnic cleansing,” i.e. evicting, terrorising, interning, raping, killing a particular ethnic group, came into common usage. It was mainly, but not only, Bosnian Serbs, who were doing the cleansing, and mainly, but not only, Bosnian Muslims who were being cleansed.

Sarajevo, the beautiful capital, was encircled by Bosnian Serbs who shelled the city from positions high in the surrounding mountains. People of all three nationalities were trapped in the city, where one in three marriages were mixed. My mother’s family was a mix of Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Muslims and less usually, Slovenes. Most Serb members left during the war, reflecting the overall demographic pattern. The siege, which was the longest inflicted on a capital city in the history of modern warfare, finally ended in February 1996, when the last Serb forces withdrew.