Alma Koprdža was born in 1989, three years before war reached her family's mountain village of Kadarići in Bosnia. She survived it as a child — bartering sheep for oil, baking by candlelight, learning to read danger before she could read a book. When the shelling stopped in 1995, she assumed the hard part was over. It wasn't.
A second war followed, quieter and longer: over who a girl was allowed to become, fought inside her own village, her own family, her own head. She spent her adolescence chasing an escape she couldn't yet name — through top grades, through ambition, and eventually into one of the first classes of women accepted into Bosnia's combat forces, where the institution meant to protect her turned out to feel as unsafe as anything she'd already survived.
At twenty-three, right at the edge of real freedom, she chose a familiar cage instead: a marriage built to please everyone but her. She stayed with that choice until exhaustion taught her the difference between escaping and choosing. Storm in Silk Gloves ends where she finally stops running from something and starts running toward it instead.
Get the BookThe wheels lifted off the runway at Dubai International Airport. As the city shrank beneath the wing, I felt relief, quiet and private. The kind that comes only when the ground lets go of you.
Dubai blurred into distance: water, heat, light, ambition. People call it extraordinary. I only knew it was far from everything I had spent years trying to outrun.
I checked my reflection in the galley mirror. The uniform sat neatly on my body, almost too neatly. Blonde hair was tucked under the cap, with clean lines and a calm face. I straightened my posture out of habit. Back straight, shoulders in. I made myself smaller than I actually was.
"Little one … I'm ready," I whispered. I wasn't sure if I was reassuring her or lying to her.
Between the rows of passengers, I performed the safety demonstration. People watched, and it unsettled me how steady I felt under their eyes. For a moment, I believed that version of myself. But something in my chest stayed hollow, like a small room I hadn't opened in years.
Then the sound came. A soft chime from the PA system—thin, ordinary. It cut through me. Suddenly, I was back in my grandmother's kitchen. One moment, I was in the airplane aisle; the next, I was barefoot on the cold floor, listening to a kettle whistling. Some days, that whistle was the only sound. Other days, it wasn't. There were sharp cracks from the hills, sounds no one wanted to name. Warm kitchen, cold air. Boiling water, distant gunfire. Safety and threat breathing in the same room.
The cabin returned, but my body stayed behind for a moment longer. Flight always felt like a place where everything heavy stayed on the ground. Except it didn't. I carried that ground with me through every takeoff, every landing, every city. No altitude was high enough to leave it behind.
But the woman in the aisle—the person I was now—didn't start there. She started long before, back in the mountains, high above, where the world felt different.
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Alma Koprdža writes about the quiet ways people survive long after the visible crisis has ended.
Born in Bosnia just three years before the war reached her village, she spent much of her life trying to understand how conflict changes us — not only through violence, but through the expectations we inherit, the roles we perform, and the identities we build to stay safe.
Her path has taken her from a mountain village to the Armed Forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, from the skies as a flight attendant to corporate life in Dubai. Across those worlds she kept returning to the same question: who are we when survival is no longer enough?
Storm in Silk Gloves is her first book — the beginning of a larger body of work exploring resilience, identity, and integration: the ongoing work of embodying every part of yourself, contradictions included.
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