Did you know that the year 2024 marked the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the birth of one of the most important Croatian children’s writers, Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić? A writer and the granddaughter of poet and viceroy Ivan Mažuranić, she wrote poems, short stories, novels, fables and fairy tales, and also did translation and editing work.

In 1913, she published the first Croatian children’s novel, Čudnovate zgode šegrta Hlapića (“The Marvellous Adventures of Hlapić the Apprentice”), and she achieved her greatest success a few years later with the work Priče iz davnine (“Croatian Tales of Long Ago”) (1916), which was translated into English in 1924 and illustrated by painter Vladimir Kirin. During her lifetime, Ivana’s “Tales” were translated into seven European languages, and her storytelling style earned her the nickname “the Croatian Andersen”.

She was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1937 she became the first woman to be elected a corresponding member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb (now the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts). She died tragically in a sanatorium in Zagreb in 1938.

*Daily Dispatch, 1924