Goran Tribuson

Goran Tribuson (Croatian pronunciation: [ɡǒran tribǔsoːn]; born August 6, 1948 Bjelovar) is a Croatian prose and screenplay writer.

Tribuson received his B.A. in literature from the Philosophical Faculty in Zagreb and his M.A. in filmology at the University of Zagreb. He worked for the Vjesnik Marketing Agency, and was a coeditor and revisor of the Croatian Lexicon. He teaches screen-writing at the Zagreb Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Along with Pavao Pavličić, Tribuson is the most productive and the most popular Croatian writer from the mid-1970s to the present day. From the point of view of style, genre and subject matter Tribuson's work can be divided in several phases which all have in common the author's concern for the reader for whom he is writing, a compact plot, a great writing skill and the avoidance of any ideology. Tribuson is equally skilled in the application of postmodernist techniques: persiflage, quotes, intertextuality, autoreference, metatextuality etc. His writing is influenced by rock and pop-culture, film and sometimes even jazz. His literary models are Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene and Karel Čapek.

He lives in Zagreb.

Tribuson began writing and publishing short-stories in various magazines while he was still at college. As a subversive reaction to the superimposed social realism in Croatian literature a generation of fantastical writers emerged in the early 1970s, and Tribuson was part of it. He is still considered to be one of the most prominent representatives of this movement. His early fantastical stories were published in three collections, Zavjera kartografa (The Cartographists Conspiracy, 1972), Praška smrt (Death in Prague, 1975) i Raj za pse (Dog Heaven, 1978). Mysticism, the occult and horror are some of the themes of these stories. Thematically, the novel Snijeg u Heidelbergu (Snow in Heidelberg, 1980) belongs to the same fantastical cycle, although it also marks the beginning of a new phase. Critics consider it one of the best works of the fantastical writers' generation. It is a kind of mixture of the sotonic and the picaresque. Tribuson returns to the fantastical and the grotesque in several other works: in his novel Potonulo groblje (Sunken Cemetery, 1990), which is considered to be a contemporary version of the gothic novel and which got him the "K. Š. Gjalski" literary award; in the novel entitled Sanatorij (Sanatorium, 1993), as well as in the collection of short-stories entitled Zvijezda kabarea (Star of the Cabaret, 1999), in which he emerges as a fully mature writer of the so-called fantastical prose.

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