Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić

Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić (Ogulin, 1874 – Zagreb, 1938) was a Croatian writer who wrote in Croatian and is widely regarded in her country as the finest writer of children's literature Croatia has produced. Her books began as stories for her own children, and they reworked the folk and mythological heritage of the Slavs into fairy tales that won her an international readership in the early twentieth century.

She was born on 18 April 1874 in Ogulin, into the well-known Mažuranić family. Her father, Vladimir Mažuranić, was a writer, lawyer and historian, and her grandfather, Ivan Mažuranić, was a politician, ban and poet. She was largely educated at home. The family moved to Karlovac, then Jastrebarsko, and finally Zagreb. In 1892 she married the lawyer and politician Vatroslav Brlić and settled in Brod na Savi, today Slavonski Brod, where she spent most of her life. For many years she devoted herself to raising her children, and she could write in earnest only once they had grown.

Her early poems, diaries and essays did not reach print until the start of the twentieth century. From 1903 she published stories and articles more regularly, including a series of educational pieces called School and Holidays. In 1913 came the book that made her name, about the poor apprentice Hlapić, who by chance finds his master's lost daughter and sees his fortunes improve. Her best-known collection, Croatian Tales of Long Ago, appeared in 1916. In it she invented new fairy tales using the names and motifs of Croatian Slavic mythology. That blend of inherited material and original invention led critics to compare her with Hans Christian Andersen and Tolkien.

Her reputation grew during her lifetime. She was nominated four times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1931, 1935, 1937 and 1938, and in 1937 she became the first woman admitted as a member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts. After a long struggle with depression, she took her own life in Zagreb on 21 September 1938.

Her legacy lives on in translations of her books into nearly every European language and many others, including Bengali, Chinese and Japanese. Adaptations followed as well: the animated film Lapitch the Little Shoemaker was released in 1997, and in 2000 Helena Bulaja began an interactive project based on her tales. She remains a central figure in Croatian children's literature.