Miro Gavran's Biography

Who is Miro Gavran?

MIRO GAVRAN is a contemporary Croatian author, born in 1961 into a family of teachers in the village of Trnava near Nova Gradiška in Slavonia. His works have been translated into 44 languages. His books have had more than 250 editions in Croatia and abroad. Over 450 theater premieres based on his plays have been staged worldwide, with more than four million theatre-goers having seen them.
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He has lived in Zagreb since he was twenty years old. He is married to actress Mladenka Gavran, with whom he founded the Gavran Theatre in 2002. Their son Jakov is an actor.

GavranFest

He is probably the only living playwright in the world who has had a festival dedicated solely to his dramas and comedies in five different countries. The festival known as the GavranFest took place in Slovakia (Trnava) from 2003 to 2009, then in2013 in Poland (Kraków), in 2016 in the Czech Republic (Prague), in 2019 and 2022 in Germany (Augsburg), in 2020 in Serbia (Belgrade), and for the first time in Munich, Germany, in 2024.

Plays

He is the most performed contemporary Croatian playwright in both Croatia and abroad. He made his debut in 1983 with the play Creon’s Antigone at the Gavella Drama Theater in Zagreb, where he powerfully addressed political manipulation. Three years later, his play Night of the Gods explored the relationship between artists and the authorities in a totalitarian system. He then wrote a series of plays focusing on male-female relationships. He created a large number of complex female characters, whose complexity makes them bothstrong and emotional.

To date, he has written fifty-six theatrical works, including When an Actor Dies, All About Women, All About Men,The Loves of George Washington, Chekhov Says Goodbye to Tolstoy, How to Kill the President, Forget Hollywood, Laughing Prohibited, Greta Garbo’s Secret, Wanted – a New Husband, Parallel Worlds, Nora Today, Hotel Babylon, The Craziest Show in the World, My Wife’s Husband, Dr. Freud’s Patient, Couples, The Doll, Ice Cream, Beer, Every Birthday of Yours, The Perfect Partner, The Spokesperson, Coffee at Noon, Agency for Happiness, Illusion, and more.

His works have premiered worldwide in cities such as Rotterdam, Washington, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Buenos Aires, Waterford,New York, Mumbai, Bratislava, Prague, Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Kraków, Belgrade,Budapest, Los Angeles, Podgorica, São Paulo, Athens, Augsburg, Vienna, Sofia, Riga, Vilnius, Antwerp, Tirana, Pristina, Hyderabad, Rome, Maribor, Novi Sad, Mostar, Brno, Trnava, Bautzen, Zagreb, Warsaw, Bangalore, Bucharest,Novosibirsk, Tallinn, Vienna, Tel Aviv, Sydney, Salzburg, Ankara...

Novels

He has published eleven novels, including The Forgotten Son, How We Broke Our Legs, Klara, Margita or a Journey into a Past Life, Judith, The Baptist, Pontius Pilate, The Only Witness of Beauty, Kafka’s Friend, A Few Birds and One Sky, and Portrait of a Soul. He has also published two short story collections, Little Unusual People and Stories of Solitude, a poetry collection titled Poems, the epic The Defense of Jerusalem, and a collection of theatrical monologues titled Theatrical Monologues.

In his early prose works, Gavran describes life in rural Croatia, portraying ordinary people, who are almost anti-heroes, yet maintain a positive outlook on life even when faced with injustice and great difficulties. This is best exemplified in his 1989 novel The Forgotten Son, in which the main character is a twenty-year-old young man with mental disabilities.

At the age of forty, Gavran began writing psychological-existential novels inspired by the Bible, modernizing biblical characters in a way that resonates with contemporary readers. Both believers and atheists enjoy reading these works, finding universal human messages within them.

His books have been published in various parts of the world: Beijing, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Oslo, Istanbul, Paris, Prague, Bratislava, Sofia, Santiago de Chile, Ljubljana, Skopje, Amsterdam, Belgrade, Pristina, Tirana, Tokyo, Jaipur, and many more. His books have been printed in more than one million copies.

Children’s Books

Miro Gavran has written ten books for children and young people, full of emotion and humor: All Sorts of Things in My Head, How Dad Won Mom, Head over Heels in Love, Happy Days, Farewell Letter, Plays with Heads and Tails, Try to Forget, Plays for Children, The Teacher of My Dreams, and Summer to Remember.

Awards

Gavran has received about thirty literary and theatrical awards in Croatia and abroad, including the Central European Time Award in 1999 for the best Central European authors for his complete works in Budapest, Hungary, and the European Circle Award in 2003 in Zagreb for the promotion of European values in his texts.

He has twice won the Ranko Marinković Award for short stories from Večernji list for the stories My Good Father and Saving the Bear. He has also won four Marin Držić Awards for drama from the Croatian Ministry of Culture for his works When an Actor Dies, Laughing Prohibited, Nora Today, and The Craziest Show in the World.

For his novel Kafka’s Friend, he received the 2012 Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts Award. His novel The Forgotten Son was included in the IBBY Honour List in 2002 in Basel, Switzerland, while his novel The Teacher of My Dreams won a Special Award at the International Festival of Literature for Young People in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2007.

For his children’s book Everything in My Head, he won the Ivana Brlić Mažuranić Award, and for Happy Days and Summer to Remember, he twice won the Mato Lovrak Award. In April 2023, he was awarded the Antun Branko Šimić Award for the poem Defense of Jerusalem, and in December of the same year, the Association of Croatian Veterans of the Homeland War '91, in cooperation with other associations formed during the Homeland War, named him the Person of 2023 for his literary achievements in Croatia and abroad.