Renato Baretić

Renato Baretic (Zagreb, 1963) is a journalist and writer. He has an incomplete degree in Comparative Literature and Phonetics at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, having also briefly studied political sciences and journalism. Baretic used to work as a warehouse assistant, assistant repairman of household appliances, assistant tile-layer, sales agent, street stall seller and worker in a factory of textile machines. He periodically works as a film and TV scriptwriter, copywriter, journalist and author of questions for the most popular Croatian TV quiz shows. Co-founder and art director of the storytelling festival Pričigin in Split and former leader of the movement for cultural revival of Croatian islands. Member of the Croatian Journalists Association, Croatian PEN Centre and Croatian Writers’ Association, he attended literary residency programs in Belgium, Austria and Turkey. His novel Eighth Commissioner won five major national prizes for fiction.

Author's titles

Renato Baretić – The Eighth Comissioner

The Eighth Comissioner

By

Znanje, 2016, 216 pages

30-pages excerpt available in English

Translations: France (Gaia Editions), Germany (Dittrich Verlag), Slovenia (Mladinska knjiga), Macedonia (Kultura), Serbia (Rende), Ukraine (Folio)

INALCO Institute in Paris Readers’ Prize
Shortlisted for the Littératures Européenes Festival Award in Cognac
National Awards: Kiklop, August Senoa, Ivan Goran Kovacic, Vladimir Nazor, Ksaver Sandor Gjalski
Bestseller in Croatia with a successful movie adaptation that is now Croatian candidate for OSCAR in Best Foreign Language Category

The Eighth Comissioner takes us on a comical, intelligent and passionate dissection of an utopia, Mediterranean style.

Siniša is an ambitious politician who gets involved in a scandal. In order to keep him away from the public eye, the government sends him to Trećić, an isolated Croatian island with no telephone or internet signal. Even worse, Siniša doesn’t speak the dialect. There, he is put in charge of organizing the local elections – a task that seven commissioners before him failed to accomplish.