Sanja Lovrenčić began collaboration with the Drama Department of Croatian Radio by submitting her works at anonymous public competitions: her play for children A Story for Damian (1988) and her radio drama Playroom (1989) were accepted for broadcast. She submitted two texts to the same competition in 1990, and both won the First Prize of Croatian Radio: Albatross in the category of radio drama and Maybe I Walked in my Sleep in the category of radio play for children. Thus began a period of her close involvement in radio.
RADIO PLAYS (with the year of first broadcasting)
Igraonica (Playroom), 1989
Sebastian, 1991
Albatros (1992) – First Prize for radio drama in 1991; published in printed form in Izbor iz suvremene hrvatske radio-drame (Selection of Contemporary Croatian Radio Drama), 1991
Fern Hill, 1993
Prozirni krčag (The Transparent Jug), 1992 – published in the collection Višekratno proročanstvo pukotina (Multiple Prophesy of Fissures)
Mlinovi (Windmills), 1993 – written at the invitation of Croatian Radio, published in the anthology Ocean u šeširu (Ocean in a Hat)
Bajka o Amoretti i Kraljeviću (The Tale of Amoretta and Prince), comedy, 1993
Zrcalo u brdima (The Mirror in the Mountains), 1994
Arielov otok (Ariel’s Island), 1993 – nominated for Prix Futura (Berlin, 1995); translated and broadcast in German (WDR, 1996, 2021); published in the Anthology of Croatian Radio Plays II, DHK, Zagreb, 2000
Pisma drugom čuvaru (Letters to the Other Guardian), 1995
Barka bez vesla i bez jedra (The Boat without Oars or Sails), written in 1996, broadcast in 2000
Krivotvoritelji (Counterfeiters), 1997
Klizalište (The Skating Rink), 1999
Devet oktava (Nine Octaves), 1999.– nominated for Prix Europa (Berlin, 1999); translated and broadcast in Hungarian and Slovakian; published in the anthology Croatian Radio Plays in the 90s
Čekanje (Waiting), based on motives from poetry by Hrvoje Pejaković, 2000
Wien Fantastic, 2001 – nominated for Prix Europa (Berlin, 2001)
Žena sa zmajem (The Woman with a Dragon), 2002 – nominated for Prix Europa (Berlin, 2002); translated and performed in Hungarian, Slovakian and Estonian
Koraci odustajanja: Camille Claudel (Steps of Renouncement: Camille Claudel), 2003
Obračun s kućom (Showdown with the House), comedy, 2004
Veliki let (The Great Flight), 2005
Šest žena na putu (Six Women on the Road), 2006
Shopping centre, 2010
Recite, kralju, nije li pjesnik bolji od pjevača (Tell us, o King, is a Poet Not Better than a Singer), 2015
Zgrada (The Building), 2020
RADIO DOCUMENTARIES
Strings Only!, 2003
Pobuna mašte protiv stvarnosti (Rebellion of Imagination against Reality), 2004
Skupljačica plesnih koraka (The Collector of Dancing Steps), 2004
O pticama i ljudima (On Birds and Humans), 2006
Ispod lipe nam zelene (Under Our Linden Tree Green), 2006; nominated for Prix Italia 2007
Slike povratka: općina Gračac (Images of Return: The Gračac Municipality), 2007
Ovdje je more uvijek blizu (Here the Sea is Always Close By), 2019
Triptih o zemlji vatre i leda (A Triptych on the Land of Fire and Ice), 2021
Mala islandska bilježnica (Little Icelandic Notebook), 2021
RADIO PLAYS FOR CHILDREN
Priča za Damjana (A Story for Damian), 1988
Možda sam hodao u snu (Maybe I Walked in my Sleep), 1990), 1st Prize for radio play for children 1991
Tko je ukrao zelene boce (Who Stole the Green Bottles), 1996
Mala virusna upala grla (A Little Sore Throat Caused by a Virus), 2004
Čarobnjakov dvorac (A Magician’s Castle), 2009
AUTHORED RADIO ADAPTATIONS
For the Drama Programme of Croatian Radio, Sanja Lovrenčić dramatized a number of different types of text. Her first authored radio adaptations were the tales by Ivana Brlić Mažuranić, Regoč (1991) and Potjeh (1992). The letters of Ivana Brlić Mažuranić were the backbone of her documentary play Gospođa od priča (The Lady of the Tales) in 1993. She developed her original radio-style working on the medieval epic about Tristan and Isolde (Drugo Izoldino putovanje morem /Isolde’s Second Sea Journey/, 2000) and on prose works by A. Fournier (Veliki Meaulnes /The Great Meaulnes/, 2000), Virginia Woolf (Valovi /The Waves/, 1993) and Selma Lagerloef (Sveti plamen /The Sacred Flame/, 1997); in the 2002 programme Leonardo – portreti mladosti (Leonardo – Portraits of Youth), she used excerpts from Leonardo da Vinci’s Quadrifolium and combined them with a documentary recording of a conversation with a fourteen-year-old boy; in the radio play entitled …the main character of that book was called Gilliatt, that was written on the basis of Victor Hugo’s novel The Toilers of the Sea, she introduced her own voice as one of the elements of dramaturgy; in the programme Grasmerska sjećanja (Grasmere Memories, 2004) she included parts of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal in a contemporary story about a woman writer, while in the radio drama Poeova Maska crvene smrti (Poe’s Mask of the Red Death, 2004) she created a kind of fantastic biography that intertwined facts from the life of Edgar Allan Poe with motifs from his story.
She used a more conventional approach to dramatization when preparing radio versions of the short stories by Theophile Gautier (Arria Marcella, 1997) and Mary Shelley (San /The Dream/, 1997), Barry Callaghan’s novel Kad stvari krenu po zlu (When Things Get Worst, 2001), Flaubert’s story Priprosto srce (Un coeur simple, 2003), Kleist’s novel Michael Kohlhaas (2005) and Hoffmann’s story Pješčar (Der Sandmann, 2008) ), as well as in radio adaptations of theatrical texts (A. de Musset, Bettine; J. Whiting, Demoni /The Devils, G. Büchner, Leonce i Lena /Leonce und Lena, E. Ionesco, Delirij u dvoje/Délire à deux, G. B. Shaw, Sveta Ivana/Saint Joan; H. Ibsen, Kad se mi mrtvi probudimo/When We Dead Awaken, A. Strindberg, Pelican; J. Anouilh, Becket). Sanja Lovrenčić also translated most of these plays into Croatian (except Ibsen and Strindberg), as well as a number of other contemporary plays originally written for radio (by Bernard da Costa, Akihiko Uzuno, Ruud van Megen, Tove Granquist, Andrus Kiviräkh).
She has also written five-part radio-adaptations of her novels In Search of Ivana, Martin’s Strings, Ardura and The Cabinet for Sentimental Trivial Literature, for the Radio Novel series of Croatian Radio Third Programme.
COOPERATION WITH THE THIRD PROGRAM
Sanja Lovrenčić started working for the Third Program of Croatian Radio as an external associate in the early 90s, and selected, translated and annotated a number of texts for the World Prose programme (editor Biljana Romić). She is the author of the translated and annotated series: Vidas and Razos – The Lives of the Troubadours and The French Novel of the 20th Century. Thanks to the support of the French Ministry of Culture, which enabled her to go on a two-month stay in Paris, she also prepared a series of programmes on contemporary Francophone literature in Quebec. As part of the World Prose series, she presented books by French and Japanese authors at that time virtually unknown in Croatia (translated from French), such as Huellebecq and Delerm, Banana Yoshimoto and Murakami. She wrote a number of short texts for the programme Words and Words (editor Irena Matijašević), some of which were published in the book The Goldfish and Eastern Ariel. Her poetry and several translations were broadcast in the programme Poetry Out Loud (editors Danijel Dragojević and Irena Matijašević). Several of her original and translated texts were broadcast in the programmes Saturn’s Children and Diaries, Letters – First-Person Speech (editor Biljana Romić). For the Third Programme of Croatian Radio she twice covered the Zagreb DOX Festival, and recorded documentaries about Jon Alpert and the ethical dilemmas of documentary filmmakers (2009), and about the use of archival material on the example of the Latvian film Klucis, The Deconstruction of an Artist directed by Peteris Krilovs (2010).