Elizabeth Gowing

Elizabeth Gowing is a British-Kosovan educator, story-teller and activist.

Education professional

She studied at Malvern Girls’ College and Magdalen College, Oxford, where she was quickly active in the environmental movement and voluntary teaching. She describes how, at a university event to explore career options, she found herself uninterested or repelled by the range of high status, high salary careers traditional among graduates, but intrigued by a table in the corner attracting no attention – advertising the Department for Education and Skills. She gained her teaching qualification at the Institute of Education in London. She taught in inner-city state sector primary schools in the London boroughs of Hackney and Islington for several years, eventually working as a Deputy Headteacher. She went on to work in education policy and consultancy.

Writing

In 2006 she went to live in Kosovo, where her partner Robert Wilton had been invited as an advisor to the Prime Minister Agim Çeku. Inspired by a hive of bees she was given for her first birthday in the country, Gowing produced her first book. Travels In Blood and Honey: Becoming a Beekeeper in Kosovo was well-received among foreign readers as well as Kosovars because it explores the country through its culture, traditions and people rather than the typical focus on conflict. The Times described it as ‘A sheer delight; a beguiling, bittersweet story of a lively love affair with a traditional world, as ancient as apiculture, in transition to new nationhood.'

She followed this with Edith and I, which uses an exploration of the life and character of the early-20th century anthropologist and Balkan traveller Edith Durham as a way of clarifying her own identity and role moving between Britain and the Balkans.

She also published The Little Book of Honey, a Gourmand World Cookbook award-winning collection of honey-based recipes described by Sophie Grigson as 'enthralling', and The Silver Thread: A journey through Balkan craftsmanship, which explores the role of silver in the region’s history, and in particular the tradition of filigree silver craftwork distinctive to Kosovo and its neighbourhood. Her 2015 book, The Rubbish-Picker's Wife: An Unlikely Friendship in Kosovo, is a more personal account of the human stories behind her efforts to found and develop a charity working among the most marginalized people in Europe (see below).

In 2019 she published Unlikely Positions in Unlikely Places: a Yoga Journey Around Britain, which recounts her experiences trying different yoga styles in different settings, and uses this as a way to explore the meaning of community. This was followed by No Man's Lands: eight extraordinary women in Balkan history, a set of essays written with her partner drawing attention to under-told lives and showing how their diverse experiences and struggles in different countries of the region have resonance in the ongoing battle for equality.

She translated from Albanian to English the biography of Yugoslavia's longest-held political prisoner, Adem Demaçi, as well as the memoirs of the Ottoman and Albanian politician Hasan Prishtina. She won the Independent on Sunday and Bradt Travel Writing Competition in 2014.

Charity work and activism

In her early years in Kosovo, Elizabeth Gowing was quickly immersed in a range of voluntary and charitable work. In 2009, together with her partner Robert Wilton and a Kosovan friend of theirs, Ardian Arifaj, she founded The Ideas Partnership as an NGO to give some framework for such activities. While its remit formally encompassed not just education but sustainable development and cultural heritage, The Ideas Partnership began to focus more on ethnic minority education and empowerment after Gowing got talking to an Ashkali child in the street who should have been in school but was excluded by a combination of disadvantage and discrimination. The Rubbish-Picker’s Wife recounts her labours to develop the charity, her evolving friendship with one particular Ashkali woman, and her growing awareness of the challenges that Kosovo’s seriously marginalized Ashkali, Egyptians and Roma face in trying to access education and basic healthcare, and more generally in sustaining community identity, representing themselves politically, and simply feeding their families.^[1]

While working to train and empower Kosovan managers and volunteers, Gowing has continued to drive much of the fund-raising herself, and to do a great deal of ground-level work as a volunteer. Her experiences developing and fund-raising for The Ideas Partnership, and speaking publicly about her work around the world, sharpened her interest in how effective story-telling is at the heart of a charity’s appeal, as well as of wider communication. She has advised diverse small charities around the world in this direction.

In late 2021, Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti asked Gowing to become his advisor on minority communities. She was able accordingly to apply at national level, and in the context of enduring international sensitivity around Kosovo’s integration of all of its minority communities, her experiences of communication, trust-building, integration and sustainable empowerment.

In recognition of her inspirational role, promotion of volunteerism and enduring hands-on engagement with charitable work, Gowing was given the ‘Mother Teresa Award’ for humanitarianism by Republic of Kosovo President Atifete Jahjaga in 2016, a ‘Points of Light’ award by UK Prime Minister Theresa May in 2017,^[2] and the Voice of Roma, Ashkali and Egyptians NGO’s ‘Joans of Kosovo Award for Social Inclusion and Justice’ in 2023.

In 2018, by Presidential decree, she was made a citizen of the Republic of Kosovo, where she continues to live and work.

References