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Timothy John Byford is an author, actor, TV film-director, translator, and educator in Serbia.
Born in Salisbury, England, Timothy John Byford started his TV career directing films for the BBCTV Blue Peter programme. His first TV documentary I Want to Be a Showjumper won a BAFTA Harlequin Award - Rediffusion Star Awards award in 1969.
In 1971 he moved to Yugoslavia, where he continued to write and direct children's television programmes during the 1970s and 1980s. He is best known for his children's TV series: Neven, Babino unuÄe and Poletarac as well as Nedeljni zabavnik, 'Musical Notebook' and Tragom ptice Dodo. 'Fledgling' won a Grand Prix at the Prix Jeunesse International Festival in Munich in 1980. For the past fifteen years he has taught English, writing and translating. In 2006, after 40 years of working with children, he joined the Children's Cultural Centre Belgrade, where he writes and directs programmes, teaches English and translates. He has written and published a self-portrait trilogy, "Pigs Do Not Eat Banana Skins," completed a collection of seven short stories under the title, "The Golden Candlestick," and is currently completing his official autobiography, "Warts and All." In 2005 he was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, a type of cancer formed by malignant plasma cells, but under the care of doctors and his wife Zorica, continues to live a relatively normal life.. One who speaks Serbian with a strong English accent is said to have a bajfordovski or Byfordian accent. His name is also associated with a park in the northern suburbs of Belgrade, Banjica Forest, as during the late 1980s he campaigned for it to have special protection because of the large number of nightingales and other species of birds that nest in it. The wood is now an officially protected natural habitat and has been dubbed by some as Byford's Forest.
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