Tomislav Ladan

Who was Tomislav Ladan?

Tomislav Ladan was a Croatian essayist, critic and novelist.

Ladan was born in Ivanjica, Serbia, and spent his formative years in his native Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he graduated at Philosophical Faculty in Sarajevo. Since he couldn't get permanent employment in the then Serbs-dominated Bosnian cultural life because of his sometimes ostentatious Croatian identity, Ladan worked intermittently as a private tutor, translator and journalist — until the Croatian doyen of belles letters, Miroslav Krleža, found him a job at the Yugoslav Lexicographical Institute in Zagreb. Ladan was the director of the same institute and the editor-in-chief of an eight-language parallel dictionary.

Ladan wrote several books of essays that cover diverse fields such as cursing in Croatian language, voluminous polygraphy playing with etymological meanings of the words that define human culture, from God to globalization, and nuances of medieval spiritual culture.

Ladan's only novel, Bosanski grb is a postmodernist fiction written as a combination of Rabelaisian linguistic feast and a treatise on the historical destiny of Croats in central Bosnia.