Tijan Sila was born in Sarajevo (1981) in the former Yugoslavia , where he spent his childhood. During the siege of the city in the Bosnian War, he fled with his family and came to Germany in 1994. He grew up in Landau in der Pfalz . As a teenager, he played guitar in the punk band Atlas Lanze.

Sila studied German and English at the Ruprecht-Karls-University in Heidelberg . His autobiographical debut novel Tierchen unlimited was published in 2017. 

In 2018, the novel Die Fahne der Wünsche followed , about an apathetic teenager who grows up in a fictional totalitarian regime. In May 2021, the novel Krach was published , in which Sila processes his youth in the Palatinate province and the punk scene of the late 1990s.

In 2023, Sila published the autobiographical book Radio Sarajevo with Hanser Blau , the second literary examination of the Bosnian civil war and escape after his debut . In the afterword, Sila explains that the book is an attempt to create a monument to his generation of war children: "In Bosnia, my parents' generation is called the 'uprooted' or the 'uprooted'. But my generation has no nickname, we are the forgotten ones. I also wrote this book to counteract forgetting." The book received positive reviews and made it onto the SWR bestseller list in spring 2024. 

Together with his wife Lena Schneider, he wrote the children's book Lila Leuchtfeuer: Geh nicht nach Nimmeruh! , which was published by Beltz & Gelberg in 2024. It was illustrated by Ariane Camus.

Sila has published essays in Die Zeit , taz and Freitag . He lives with his wife and their daughter in Kaiserslautern. In addition to writing, he works as a German teacher at a vocational school and is part of the punk band Korrekte Drinks. 

*The surname Sila (Bosnian for “strength”, “power”) is a stage name .
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Tijan Sila kam 1981 in Sarajevo zur Welt und emigrierte 1994 mit seiner Familie nach Deutschland. Er studierte Germanistik und Anglistik in Heidelberg. Heute lebt er in Kaiserslautern, wo er als Lehrer an einer Berufsschule arbeitet. Im Frühjahr 2017 erschien sein Debütroman »Tierchen unlimited« bei Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2018 folgte »Die Fahne der Wünsche«. Er hört Punkrock, seitdem er als Kind das Video zu dem Ramones-Lied »I wanna be sedated« gesehen hat und ist Gitarrist der Punkband Korrekte Drinks.