Room for Nobody

Azra Kolakovic - born January 1, 1977 in Bihac, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has been engaged in music from an early age. She plays piano and, in her childhood, as an instrumentalist during her schooling in the School of Arts, she achieves many successes and awards in competitions throughout the former Yugoslavia. The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina interrupts her ambitions and dreams of becoming a pianist, and due to the inability to pursue the planned continuation of education in Vienna, she completely ignores classical music and replaces it with the commercial pop music. She makes her first public appearance under the stage name Donna Ares in 1977 in the Croatian selection for Eurovision song and thus begins a very successful career of a prominent and award-winning singer, composer and songwriter, which is interrupted after she learns of the difficult diagnosis of cancer with metastases in an advanced stage.
Although she has written songs and successfully worked for almost twenty years as a composer and songwriter, she has never dreamed that one day she would write a book, but as she says "life writes the best novels". Her cognition, experiences and knowledge that she gained during her difficult struggle for life were turned into her first book Room for Nobody for which she hopes will help other people to face their fears and personal struggles, not only with cancer and disease but also with the crazy pace of life nowadays.
By publishing statuses and photos via Facebook, she gains wide attention of people across the region, who have been connected through her songs for years, and now she does that by publishing different serious hospital situations, stressful stages of recovery after difficult chemotherapy cycles to the final recovery and in this way she encourages many people with cancer worldwide. While she was struggling with the disease, she founded the "Foundation Donna Ares" to help people suffering from cancer and other malignant diseases and through the foundation, in future, she wants to be maximally engaged, for the purpose of each tiny improvement of the health system. She held a big charity concert for cancer patients in the Zetra Olympic Hall in Sarajevo, which enrolled her in the history of music as a singer who dared to perform between two cycles of chemotherapy and succeeded in that. The author currently lives and works in Denmark after beating the disease. The artist has become a symbol of courage in the fight against cancer in homeland and region.