RANKO MARINKOVIĆ|Back to Contents

Ranko Marinković (Vis, February 22, 1913 - Zagreb, January 28, 2001.) Croatian writer and playwright. He finished elementary school in his birthplace, went to high school in Split and in Zagreb where he graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy. He was arrested in Split while it was occupied during WWII and imprisoned in the Ferramonte camp in Calabria. After the Fall of Italy in 1943 he made his way to Bari, then to the Sinai refugee camp in El Shatt. After the war he worked in the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of Croatia, the Croatian Publishing Institute and from 1946 to 1950 he was the drama director of the Zagreb National Theatre. In 1951 he was employed as a professor at the Academy of Theatre in Zagreb where he worked until his retirement. He was a full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts and a member of the Society of Croatian Writers from 1948. Marinković’s literary opus includes poetry, literary and theatrical critical pieces, essays, plays, short stories and novels. His most significant period of creativity, during which he wrote numerous short stories, some of which found their way into his famous collection Ruke (Hands), began after WWII. The first performance of his miracle play Glorija (Gloria) in 1955, directed by Bojan Stupica, caused a sensation because it portrayed the conflict between the individual and dogmatism and its rigid social norms. In the novel Kiklop (Cyclops) which was published ten years later, Marinković depicted Zagreb before WWII relying on analytical descriptions of the psychic state of his characters, on subtle irony and on black humour. His anti-novel Zajednička kupka (Common Bath) was written in the same vein. He rounded off his opus in 1993 with the symbolically-titled work Never more (Nikad više). He was the recipient of a number of literary awards. For his novels Kiklop and Never more he was awarded Vjesnik’s award for literary achievement “Ivan Goran Kovačić”.

Marinković’s works have been translated into many languages.

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