Azra Kolaković was born on January 1, 1977 in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has been involved in music since she was a child, playing the piano and already in her childhood as an instrumentalist during her studies at the Art School, she achieved numerous successes and awards at competitions throughout the then Yugoslavia. The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina interrupted her ambitions and dreams of becoming a pianist, and due to the impossibility of continuing her education in Vienna, she completely neglected classical music and replaced it with commercial pop music. She performed for the first time in public under the stage name Donna Ares in 1997 at the Croatian Eurovision Song Contest, thus beginning a very successful musical career as a prominent and award-winning singer, composer and songwriter, which was interrupted by the discovery of a difficult diagnosis of advanced metastatic cancer.

Although she has been writing songs and working successfully as a composer and songwriter for almost twenty years, she never dreamed that she would one day write a book, but as she herself says that "life writes the best novels," she turned her insights, experiences, and knowledge through a difficult struggle for life into her first book, A Room for Nobody, in the hope that it would help other people face their fears and personal struggles, not only with cancer and illnesses, but also with the crazy pace of life today.