Zehra Deović

Zehra Deović, born on 9 December 1938 in Foča, was a Bosnian singer of sevdalinka and folk music, and one of the leading female singers of Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s, alongside Nada Mamula, Beba Selimović and Silvana Armenulić. She lived and worked in Sarajevo, and for 38 years she recorded for Radio Sarajevo.

During the Second World War she lived as a refugee in Sarajevo with her mother, sister and brother, returning to Foča in 1946, where she finished elementary school and grammar school. As a girl she joined the town's youth cultural society Jedinstvo, and from 1953 she toured the cities of Yugoslavia with it, singing beside names such as Vuka Šeherović.

In 1960 she moved to Sarajevo to study at the Pedagogical Academy and that year passed the audition for Radio Sarajevo with "Dvije su se vode zavadile", the sevdalinka that came to mark her career; she recorded it in several versions and filmed a video for it in Foča. She signed with Jugoton, and her first record, Pjesme iz Bosne, came out on 11 December 1962. Some two hundred of her recordings are kept in the archive of BHRT's music production.

She was a regular at the Ilidža festival, at the Beogradski sabor and at the festival of Danube countries in Novi Sad. At Ilidža in 1967 she shared "Prošle su tužne noći" with Nedžad Salković and won a second jury prize, and in 1985 "Poklon Bosni" won her an award for interpretation at a folk music festival in Sarajevo. Her albums include Dvije su se vode zavadile (1976), Zehrin sevdah (1982) and Kad procvatu behari (1990), the last recorded with the choir of the Gazi Husrev-beg Madrasa, with whom she also sang ilahije and kaside.

Among her best-known songs are "Da sam ptica", "Kolika je Jahorina planina", "Snijeg pade na behar, na voće" and "U Cazinu bijela kula". She received the estrada awards of Yugoslavia and of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1980, a Grand Prix for lifetime achievement in sevdah in 2005, and a plaque for preserving sevdah at Baščaršijske noći in 2014.

Her last public appearance was on 1 March 2015 in a BHRT programme dedicated to Safet Isović, where she premiered a song for him. Zehra Deović died in Sarajevo on 30 October 2015.