All prizes Croatia
Književna nagrada tportala
Croatia · Since 2008 · For books in Croatian
Awarded each year in Zagreb by the news portal tportal.hr to the best novel of the previous year whose first edition was published in Croatian by a publisher registered in Croatia. A jury picks eleven semifinalists and then five finalists before naming the winner.
The news portal tportal.hr, owned by Hrvatski Telekom, founded the award in 2008 as roman@tportal.hr to recognise the best Croatian novel regardless of its author's fame or sales. Publishers and authors submit novels first published in Croatian during the previous calendar year, usually around fifty a year. A jury of critics, writers, translators and other cultural figures narrows them down to eleven semifinalists and then five finalists, and names the winner at a ceremony in Zagreb, in recent years in June. The award cannot be shared. The prize, once 100,000 kuna, has been 15,000 euros since 2025, and since 2022 the winning novel has also been recorded as an audiobook. The award carries the year of the ceremony, so the 2026 award went to a novel published in 2025.
tportal 2026 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Who Is That Man?”
Boris Dežulović · 61 when first published
Novel · 339 pages · Historical, Speculative, Politics
AI-generated summary:In Munich in 1923, just before the rise of Nazism, Frederick Walter plans to stop a future dictator with a single sniper's shot, while an American journalist tells the story.
tportal 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Sundial”
Damir Karakaš · 58 when first published
Novel · 119 pages · Nature
AI-generated summary:Early one morning a grandfather leads his grandson through the forest by the sun, and their talk reveals that they are out to find the devil, who, the old man says, looks just like a man.
tportal 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“There Were Many Flowers in the House and in the Garden”
Novel · 228 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:In fragments of memory, the author goes back to her childhood in the 1980s in a house full of flowers with the parents who adopted her, and to her troubled birth parents.
tportal 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Life in a Cannon That Isn't There”
Nenad Stipanić · 52 when first published
Novel · 158 pages · Coming of age, Migration, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:In Berlin in November 2021, a middle-aged man starting a new life abroad goes back over his childhood with his grandparents in Senj, his schooling and youth, as coward and hero by turns.
tportal 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“So Be It”
Novel · 261 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:In first-century Judea, seething against Rome, Eleazar, a disillusioned revolutionary turned mercenary, hunts self-proclaimed messiahs until he meets someone who makes him doubt his service.
tportal 2025 · Winner
Olja Knežević · 56 when first published
Novel · 247 pages · Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:A wife and mother lives on the move across Europe with her children and her powerful, selfish husband, who is wanted on an unpublished political warrant, until she begins to rebel and look for her own voice.
tportal 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“It's Too Much for Me. Eight Little Girls”
Darko Cvijetić · 56 when first published
Novel · 197 pages · War
AI-generated summary:Drawing on a true event in Prijedor, a novel of poetic fragments, documents and sketches about the deaths of eight girls in the war and a community that never faced its guilt.
tportal 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Catastrophes”
Dragan Jurak · 57 when first published
Novel · 199 pages
AI-generated summary:A fragmentary novel of micro-notes, between essay, diary and literary puzzle, about everyday and historical collapse, from climate change and war to private ruin.
tportal 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Matches”
Jurica Pavičić · 59 when first published
Novel · 285 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:One March a fire near Split, driven by the bora, spreads over Mount Mosor and kills a man, and Inspector Petar Fradelić must find out who started it.
tportal 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Croatian Mother”
Novel · 175 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:In a village of Hrvatsko Zagorje, young people face unemployment, shallow relationships and a craze for sport, dream of a better life abroad, and confront medical manipulation in the form of a male pregnancy.
tportal 2024 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Scavengers of the Old World”
Novel · 140 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A daughter tells of growing up with her father and of memories of her mother, of their small flat and the boat they take out fishing to escape their troubles, until her father falls ill.
tportal 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Flood”
Damir Karakaš · 56 when first published
Novel · 91 pages · Coming of age, War, Love
AI-generated summary:A young man driven by dreams and vague artistic ambitions, torn by love and war, looks for a balance between the world he comes from and the one he longs for.
tportal 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Case of One's Own Peril”
Kristian Novak · 44 when first published
Novel · 276 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:A young secondary-school teacher takes over the drama group with a demanding method, and then a young traffic policeman is found dead in town, and everything changes.
tportal 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Harvest Season”
Magdalena Blažević · 41 when first published
Novel · 147 pages · Love, Family
AI-generated summary:After a short love affair ends, the photographer Una goes to her parents' house in a long-abandoned village and, with an analogue camera, uncovers the old story of her mother and a lover.
tportal 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Book for Maja”
Marko Tomaš · 45 when first published
Novel · 183 pages · War, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:In poetic fragments a narrator gathers the memories that made him: homecoming, lost loved ones and childhood images of a generation whose youth was cut short by war.
tportal 2023 · Winner
U kasno ljeto
Magdalena Blažević · 40 when first published
Novel · 165 pages · War, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Fourteen-year-old Ivana, killed by an enemy unit, tells of the childhood she shared with her friend Dunja in a Bosnian village before the war swept their world away.
tportal 2023 · Shortlist
Psi
Dora Šustić · 31 when first published
Novel · 152 pages · Love, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:Dora, who studies screenwriting at FAMU in Prague, has a passionate affair with Leon, an older photographer who cannot get over the death of his young Andalusian wife.
tportal 2023 · Shortlist
Mater Dolorosa
Jurica Pavičić · 57 when first published
Novel · 336 pages · Crime, Family
AI-generated summary:In Split in autumn 2022, inspector Zvone Carev investigates the murder of schoolgirl Viktorija Zeba, while the killer's mother Katja and sister Ines cope in their own way with what he has done.
tportal 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Summers with Marija”
Olja Savičević Ivančević · 48 when first published
Novel · 168 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:In an old stone house in a small Dalmatian town, a hundred years of memories pass between women who are all named Marija, or Mare, Marijola, Maša or Mara, in episodes set mostly in summer.
tportal 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Life Sentence”
Vedrana Rudan · 73 when first published
Novel · 219 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:When the husband she loved dies, sixty-year-old Lola loses the will to live and goes back over her life as a woman, her motherhood, her hard bond with her daughter Tina, and a death she caused.
tportal 2022 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Land Without Twilight”
Novel · 255 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:The biologist Glorija Suton visits her father in the Dalmatian hinterland, and her return home turns into a painful reckoning with family secrets, traumas and the childhood that shaped her.
tportal 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“From Nowhere with Love”
Đorđe Matić · 51 when first published
Novel · 260 pages · Migration, War
AI-generated summary:Forced to leave his homeland in 1991, the narrator wanders as an exile from one end of the continent to the other, north and south and north again, among thousands of people with the same fate.
tportal 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Alone”
Marinko Koščec · 54 when first published
Novel · 403 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:The members of a Zagreb family of three generations each tell their own version of life during the earthquake and the Covid-19 pandemic, when fear shakes the already unstable ground of their relationships.
tportal 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“My Dowry”
Novel · 174 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A lonely girl who does not fit the roles expected of her spends her summers with her grandmother in Vela Luka on Korčula, in freedom and love, disturbed only by her violent, patriarchal uncle Kuzma.
tportal 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“One of a Kind”
Novel · 169 pages · Satire, Love
AI-generated summary:In spring 1991 in a village of Hrvatsko Zagorje, Beba, the smallest piglet in godmother Anka's sty, begins to speak like a human and soon becomes a star.
tportal 2021 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Bony-Legged Bride”
Želimir Periš · 45 when first published
Novel · 445 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Gila, called Kostonoga, a witch, healer and herbalist of the 19th century, travels through Dalmatia, Istria and Austria in a tale of beliefs, superstitions and fables told to the rhythm of folk epic verse.
tportal 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Landing”
Darko Šeparović · 33 when first published
Novel · 143 pages
AI-generated summary:A man who works patiently with wood watches the landing opposite his house, where boats come and go and people arrive and leave, and records what he sees in the slow rhythm of contemplation.
tportal 2021 · Shortlist
Radio Siga
Ivan Vidak · 39 when first published
Novel · 208 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:Kalman Gubica, born in 1920 in a remote village in Bačka and raised as an orphan, becomes the village drummer and crier, until just before the Second World War he is struck by lightning.
tportal 2021 · Shortlist
Sinovi, kćeri
Ivana Bodrožić · 38 when first published
Novel · 262 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:Three voices unlock their private lives: a young woman paralysed in a hospital bed, the person she is in love with, and her unhappy mother.
tportal 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Travelling Theatre”
Zoran Ferić · 59 when first published
Novel · 475 pages · Family, Historical, War
AI-generated summary:A family saga of the 20th century and its three wars begins in the 1920s, when the nurse Ivka Benceković meets the surgeon Benjamin Bernstein, a Jewish émigré who fled Petrograd after the October Revolution.
tportal 2020 · Winner
Proslava
Damir Karakaš · 52 when first published
Novel · 116 pages · War, Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:At the end of a war a man from the losing side hides in a forest in Lika, waiting to surrender; four chapters reach ever deeper into the past of three generations of his poor family.
tportal 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Party”
Novel · 321 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:A morally stunted, intellectually limited but megalomaniac young man climbs at lightning speed up the hierarchy of a political party.
tportal 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Within Reach”
Ena Katarina Haler · 23 when first published
Novel · 460 pages · Family, War, Historical
AI-generated summary:When two elderly sisters return to Banija to see the land taken from them by the communists, Katarina goes back in memory to 1942 and the wartime childhood that took her family from Banija to Zagreb and Slavonia.
tportal 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Balance Wheel”
Novel · 182 pages
AI-generated summary:A gravely ill retired watchmaker begins to accept the end of his life, spending his last heartbeats remembering a life he feels he has wasted.
tportal 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“How to Love a Shark?”
Nataša Govedić · 50 when first published
Novel · 255 pages
AI-generated summary:In 64 fragments of prose and poetry, Kasai writes about her thirty-year friendship with Ofelija, which Ofelija broke off by withdrawing into silence, as her depression told her to.
tportal 2019 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Road to Gonars”
Nikola Petković · 56 when first published
Novel · 307 pages · War, Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:Drawing on his grandfather's notes, the author tells of Nikola Luzer, whose wife Jelena is taken to the Italian concentration camp of Gonars, leaving him with their four-year-old daughter in wartime Bakar.
tportal 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Call to Prayer”
Ivana Šojat · 47 when first published
Novel · 381 pages · Historical, War, Love
AI-generated summary:On his deathbed Ibrahim remembers how, as a boy called Luka, he was taken from his mother as tribute in blood and raised a janissary, fighting through the 16th century and loving his wife Vasilisa.
tportal 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Wild Geese”
Julijana Adamović · 49 when first published
Novel · 233 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Twin voices tell of a childhood in a xenophobic village on the plains in the 1970s, where the poisoned relations between mother, grandmother and father make the child a victim.
tportal 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Rosewood Guitar”
Novel · 211 pages
AI-generated summary:A guitar made of spruce and rosewood passes from hand to hand, and the lives of five women whose fates it touches meet and intertwine.
tportal 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Patient in Room 19”
Zoran Žmirić · 49 when first published
Novel · 204 pages · War
AI-generated summary:Vanja Kovačević, sent to war on his nineteenth birthday, tells a psychiatrist about his childhood, the war, fatherhood and killing, 25 years after he first took up a rifle.
tportal 2018 · Winner
Lisica
Dubravka Ugrešić · 68 when first published
Novel · 308 pages
AI-generated summary:The fox, a figure of cunning, runs through six loosely linked chapters in which a first-person narrator reflects on storytelling, writers and the line between the real and the invented.
tportal 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Quiet Demolition”
Ivica Prtenjača · 48 when first published
Novel · 151 pages
AI-generated summary:A literature teacher who never got a school post works as a house painter, and while he strips and knocks down the walls of a flat in central Zagreb, his client's extraordinary life story unsettles them both.
tportal 2018 · Shortlist
Crvena voda
Jurica Pavičić · 52 when first published
Novel · 345 pages · Crime, Family
AI-generated summary:Seventeen-year-old Silva Vela vanishes one September weekend in 1989 in a small Dalmatian town, and her parents and brother spend the next 27 years looking for her as Croatia passes through war and transition.
tportal 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Irena Tot Experiment”
Korana Serdarević · 35 when first published
Novel · 235 pages
AI-generated summary:Irena Tot, a successful young woman deeply unhappy with her life, decides to change and play with cards other than those she was dealt at birth, against her own and others' prejudices.
tportal 2018 · Shortlist
Novel · 167 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:A man who may or may not be the film director Werner Herzog travels to the 16th century to follow Montaigne on his journey to Italy and film the waters and baths he meets along the way.
tportal 2017 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“A Gypsy, but the Most Beautiful”
Kristian Novak · 37 when first published
Novel · 392 pages · Love, Crime
AI-generated summary:In two villages on Croatia's northern border, one Croatian and one Roma, a secret and forbidden love, long silences and two murders unfold, told in four voices.
tportal 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Memory of the Forest”
Damir Karakaš · 49 when first published
Novel · 132 pages · Coming of age, Family
AI-generated summary:A boy grows up in a small village in Lika in the 1970s and early 1980s, under strict parents and among friends, villagers and a teacher, discovering the world and a mystery hidden in his own body.
tportal 2017 · Shortlist
EEG
Daša Drndić · 70 when first published
Novel · 412 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Andreas Ban, the cynical hero of an earlier novel, survives a suicide attempt and goes on dissecting society and his own past, uncovering the hidden horrors of everyone around him.
tportal 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Singer in the Night”
Olja Savičević Ivančević · 42 when first published
Novel · 146 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Naranča, a successful writer of TV soap operas, sets off from Split through Bosnia and beyond in search of Slavuj, the strange artist she loved until the chaos of their lives drove them apart.
tportal 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Stable Sickness”
Slađana Bukovac · 45 when first published
Novel · 292 pages · Crime, Politics
AI-generated summary:A young woman tends animals on a farm, a retired professor's dog is poisoned over his work for human rights, and a local journalist investigates a multiple murder, in a provincial world of violence and corruption.
tportal 2016 · Winner
Doba mjedi
Slobodan Šnajder · 67 when first published
Novel · 365 pages · Historical, War, Love
AI-generated summary:From the hungry Germany of the 18th century, when families emigrated east, to the expulsion of the Germans from Yugoslavia in 1945, the story of the Danube Swabians through the wartime love of Georg and Vera.
tportal 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Your Son Huckleberry Finn”
Bekim Sejranović · 43 when first published
Novel · 336 pages · Family, Nature
AI-generated summary:A story of love, fathers and sons, drugs, identity and smuggling that is above all about a river, the Sava, its history, its eddies and fish, its harbours and the towns along its banks.
tportal 2016 · Shortlist
Oblak boje kože
Nebojša Lujanović · 34 when first published
Novel · 381 pages · Family, Crime
AI-generated summary:Young Enis Selmanić flees Zagreb after being accused of starting a fire in the café where he worked, while his sister Sanda tries to escape a Roma ghetto and their father Fabo belongs to neither world.
tportal 2016 · Shortlist
Područje bez signala
Robert Perišić · 46 when first published
Novel · 424 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:Two men, Oleg and Nikola, bring the engineer Sobotka back to restart a ruined factory in a remote town during the post-socialist transition, in a story that reaches from Siberia to the Maghreb and London.
tportal 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“In Solitude by the Sea”
Zoran Ferić · 54 when first published
Novel · 341 pages · Love, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:On the island of Rab, a few local lads and small-town girls, Luka, Boris, Gavran, Škembo, Lena and Alka, are followed from hormone-charged adolescence to the tired moments when they begin to take stock of their lives.
tportal 2015 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Rocky Rocket”
Zoran Malkoč · 47 when first published
Novel · 432 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:In a Slavonia far from the postcards, two outsiders, a writer who is a criminal and his double, are looked after by the hero of the story, Roki Raketa, who is a dog.
tportal 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Carnal Intruder”
Igor Rajki · 49 when first published
Novel · 224 pages
AI-generated summary:A novel that questions how a novel is written, full of footnotes, advertisements, margin pictures and coloured pages, about love, life and death, reality and illusion.
tportal 2015 · Shortlist
Brdo
Ivica Prtenjača · 45 when first published
Novel · 156 pages · Nature
AI-generated summary:Dismissed as head of public relations at Zagreb's Museum of Contemporary Art, a burnt-out man flees the city to spend a summer alone as a fire lookout on top of an Adriatic island.
tportal 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Priestess of the Moon”
Milena Benini · 48 when first published
Novel · 318 pages · Historical, War, Speculative
AI-generated summary:An epic tale inspired by history and by the Illyrian and Roman heritage of the Adriatic, about the destructive power of war, first published in instalments on the author's blog.
tportal 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Mima and the Squaring of Debt”
Želimir Periš · 39 when first published
Novel · 235 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:An unemployed systems engineer with no prospects is hired by the police to unmask an online identity behind a mysterious threat, but Mima has her own reasons to fear exposure, and threats and murders follow.
tportal 2014 · Winner
Črna mati zemla
Kristian Novak · 34 when first published
Novel · 293 pages
AI-generated summary:A successful young writer who has long woven his memories from scraps of other people's stories decides to face what really happened in the village of his childhood, events he has buried deep.
tportal 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Hacked Kitty”
Novel · 231 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A young anthropologist finishing her doctorate is blocked by her own perfectionism and starts to analyse her strange love life with the logic of scholarship, never suspecting that her whole life is being hacked.
tportal 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Return of Filip Latinović”
Boris Perić · 47 when first published
Novel · 223 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:The painter Filip Latinović, borrowed from Krleža's classic novel, comes home after years in a psychiatric hospital and tries to find his bearings in a Croatia of wild capitalism.
tportal 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Artificial Tears”
Milko Valent · 65 when first published
Novel · 1401 pages · Love, Politics
AI-generated summary:A modern monogamous marriage falls apart over love and one partner's infertility, while an investigative journalist uncovers corruption, hypocrisy and false political morality, in a novel of more than 1,400 pages.
tportal 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“State of Twilight”
Sibila Petlevski · 49 when first published
Novel · 372 pages · Historical · Tabu, book 3
AI-generated summary:The last book of the Tabu trilogy draws together the characters of the first two and closes the tragic story of Viktor Tausk, forgotten writer, lawyer and pioneer of psychoanalysis.
tportal 2013 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Be Hamlet, Mister Hamlet!”
Tahir Mujičić · 65 when first published
Novel · 326 pages · Love, War, Satire
AI-generated summary:František, a Czech actor, is drawn from the Prague Spring of 1968 to Dubrovnik's Lovrijenac fortress, the stage of his dreams and of a love he found there, only to run into political and professional trouble up to the war of 1991.
tportal 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Lie Detector”
Igor Rajki · 47 when first published
Novel · 172 pages
AI-generated summary:The narrator once wrote, in the form of a leaflet, a story about the inventor of a lie detector, then lost it, and now searches for it everywhere: in the tap, in a razor, in a hair dryer, in the supermarket.
tportal 2013 · Shortlist
Josip Mlakić · 48 when first published
Novel · 254 pages · Speculative, Politics
AI-generated summary:In a near future without states, corporations rule a planet renamed Friedman, divided into zones by wealth, and Dr Gerhard Schmidt, a privileged citizen, is drawn into the hunt for a rebel leader called Blacktooth.
tportal 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Museum of the Revolution”
Pavao Pavličić · 66 when first published
Novel · 303 pages · Historical, War, Politics
AI-generated summary:In 1952 a fight at their induction into the Pioneers binds three boys for life, sons of a fallen partisan, an executed enemy of the people and a family that merely endured history; the question is whether their friendship can survive Yugoslavia's end.
tportal 2013 · Shortlist
Božanska dječica
Tatjana Gromača · 41 when first published
Novel · 218 pages · Family, War
AI-generated summary:A daughter tells of her mother's mental illness, of the family around her and of a society poisoned by war, hatred and intolerance, where it is hard to say who is sick and who is well.
tportal 2012 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“I Dreamed of Elephants”
Ivica Đikić · 34 when first published
Novel · 255 pages · Crime, Politics
AI-generated summary:From the 1970s to the late 1990s and from Frankfurt to Zagreb, criminals, emigrants, spies, prosecutors, war criminals and politicians are bound together in the tangled world of secret services, politics and organised crime.
tportal 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“There Will Be No Miracles Here”
Goran Ferčec · 33 when first published
Novel · 229 pages · Family, War
AI-generated summary:Bender, a young intellectual who sat out the wars in a Western city, is called home by his father to a village emptied by war, where his conflict with himself, his demons and his father deepens.
tportal 2012 · Shortlist
Luka Bekavac · 35 when first published
Novel · 158 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Marta, a student finishing her degree, goes to Drenje in Baranja to record how the war changed the region's soundscape, and her research slowly turns into a search for something mysterious and frightening.
tportal 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“We Had Such a Lovely Time!”
Sibila Petlevski · 47 when first published
Novel · 230 pages · Historical, Family · Tabu, book 2
AI-generated summary:The second book of the Tabu trilogy carries Viktor Tausk's story into a family saga, mixing the facts of his life with fiction around nation, faith, sexuality, death and the search for happiness.
tportal 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Mayan Calendar”
Zoran Ferić · 50 when first published
Novel · 603 pages · Coming of age, Love
AI-generated summary:On a reunion voyage from Opatija to Zadar, retired classmates repeat their school-leaving trip, and the gynaecologist Tihomir Romar looks back on growing up in Zagreb, his friendships, losses, a fatal love and his fear of ageing.
tportal 2011 · Winner
Adio kauboju
Olja Savičević Ivančević · 36 when first published
Novel · 175 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A small Dalmatian town stands in for the Wild West in a story of a family facing a death, of growing up, of going back to one's roots and of a search for a truth that sets one free.
tportal 2011 · Shortlist
Novel · 218 pages · War
AI-generated summary:In Dubrovnik in early 1992, Jane Perkanova speaks into a cassette recorder, in the dialect of the Dubrovnik hinterland, about how her father, an Orthodox priest, abducted her from home when she was thirteen.
tportal 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Homeland, Oblivion”
Ludwig Bauer · 69 when first published
Novel · 430 pages · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:Danube Germans look for their roots in the homeland they lost, a place of refuge, nostalgia and forgetting, while the hero, a believer in ideals, longs to forget himself.
tportal 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Few Days in August”
Mirjana Dugandžija · 50 when first published
Novel · 207 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:One woman's life in four intertwined stories: a late affair with a married man after a hard marriage, a journalist's struggle in a servile newsroom, her family's old age in a new state, and a search for forgotten relatives.
tportal 2011 · Shortlist
Voda, paučina
Nada Gašić · 60 when first published
Novel · 517 pages · Crime, Family
AI-generated summary:The story starts with the Zagreb flood of 27 October 1964 and follows a family tragedy and a crime story in today's Trešnjevka, a world of death, prostitution, police and mafia.
tportal 2010 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Time of Lies”
Sibila Petlevski · 45 when first published
Novel · 226 pages · Historical · Tabu, book 1
AI-generated summary:The first book of the Tabu trilogy follows the life of Viktor Tausk, Croatian lawyer, journalist, writer and pioneer of psychoanalysis, in the early 20th century, with an eye to the suicide that ended it.
tportal 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Rubber Souls”
Novel · 144 pages
AI-generated summary:Alma has shaped her life through literature, reading and copying out books in search of deeper truths that might save her from a harsh reality and keep her in a world of imagination.
tportal 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Broken”
Novel · 416 pages
AI-generated summary:Nine people take turns to speak in nine chapters, among them a lost husband, an unloved wife, an abused child, a spying friend and a woman with cancer, in a story of life in today's Croatia seen through sexuality.
tportal 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Half-Sleep”
Ratko Cvetnić · 52 when first published
Novel · 558 pages
AI-generated summary:In Zagreb at the end of the 1980s, Vjeko Modrić, an ironic law student who never finished his degree, drifts between odd jobs, his girlfriend Branka, his family and a crowd of careerists, party officials and bad writers.
tportal 2010 · Shortlist
Zoran Žmirić · 40 when first published
Novel · 206 pages · War
AI-generated summary:A nameless soldier, whose identity, past and even side remain unknown, tells in the first person of a war that could be any war, its everyday scenes pushed to the edge of the absurd.
tportal 2009 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Three”
Drago Glamuzina · 41 when first published
Novel · 249 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:One man is caught between two women, and the two very different relationships he keeps with them, full of love and torment, jealousy and tenderness, obsession and tolerance, leave room for nothing else.
tportal 2009 · Shortlist
Baba Jaga je snijela jaje
Dubravka Ugrešić · 59 when first published
Novel · 327 pages
AI-generated summary:A retelling of the myth of Baba Yaga, the old witch of Slavic folklore, in three parts that mix autobiography, fiction and a mock-scholarly study of what it means to grow old as a woman.
tportal 2009 · Shortlist
Renato Baretić · 45 when first published
Novel · 258 pages · Coming of age, Family, Crime
AI-generated summary:An uninvited guest posts chapters of a novel on a literary blog: in it, 25-year-old Filip goes back to the Hotel Grand in a Dalmatian town, where his father once ran a brothel, to trace the childhood he spent there.
tportal 2009 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Medals for Sale, One Owner”
Novel · 139 pages · War
AI-generated summary:Viktor, a Zagreb lawyer, cannot find peace after the war he fought in: haunted by guilt and trauma, he sets out to find the mother of a young man he killed.
tportal 2009 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Martin's Strings”
Sanja Lovrenčić · 47 when first published
Novel · 220 pages · Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:A young, educated woman tries to make room for herself in a family still bound by patriarchal habits, without hurting anyone, as the family moves abroad in search of a better life.
tportal 2008 · Winner
Novel · 329 pages · Love, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In 1990s Zagreb, Goran Kanevski, a reserved intellectual of about thirty, leaves behind a dying student life and a purely physical affair, and grows into a new person when he meets the love of his life, Anastasia.
tportal 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Eyes”
Edo Popović · 50 when first published
Novel · 238 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:The photographer Ivan Kalda grows up on society's margins as Croatia changes around him over the last decades, in a novel that is at once a coming-of-age story and a social portrait.
tportal 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“On the Trail of the Snake's Skin”
Josip Mlakić · 43 when first published
Novel · 163 pages · Love, Historical
AI-generated summary:From his cell in the Franciscan monastery of Fojnica, Friar Ivo Lašvanin, listener and keeper of others' stories, measures his life by two deaths: that of Friar Petar, who watched over him, and that of Katarina, the woman he loved.
tportal 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“City in the Mirror”
Mirko Kovač · 69 when first published
Novel · 350 pages · Autofiction, Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A writer looks back on his childhood between Trebinje, Nikšić and Dubrovnik, his large family and above all his father, in an autobiographical family nocturne built on memory rather than chronology.
tportal 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Quiet Street, Tree-Lined”
Nada Gašić · 57 when first published
Novel · 290 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:In the sultry August of 2003, behind the quiet façades of one Zagreb street, spies manqués, depressed ladies, closeted men and ageing charmers live their small lives, until a war veteran treated for PTSD is murdered.