Biography

Vesna Krmpotić-Petković was born in Dubrovnik in 1932. She has lived in Split, Zagreb, New Delhi, Cairo, Washington, Accra and Belgrade.
She graduated from Zagreb University, majoring in English language and literature as well as in Psychology.
She writes poetry, novels, short stories, plays, essays and translates from English.
She studied Bengali at New Delhi University.
She lives in Belgrade.

Vesna has published 84 books. Most of the books have had several editions and have been translated into other languages, including English, Italian, German, Slovenian, Lithuanian, Russian and Slovak that together make another 50 publications.
Vesna has received many literary awards, some of which are The award of Nolit, Goran’s Award, Zlatni muflon (The Gold Mouflon), The Award of the steel company Sisak, Nazor’s Award for the book of the year, The Award of Sever, and Nazor’s Award for life achievement. She was elected a Person of Dialogue for the year 2005 by the Croatian Academic Association, Split.

She is the author of a unique and so far the world’s most voluminous collection of poems, “108 x 108,” which contains 11,664 poems and was published in the middle of 2006. She is the author of nine books with 972 fairy tales published under the same title “Divni stranac” (“The Wonderful Stranger”).

Vesna published the first anthology of Indian literature in this area under the title “Hiljadu lotosa” (A Thousand Lotuses) that has had five editions and also the first translation of the “Kama Sutra.” She translated Tagore’s Gitanjali (three editions) as well as a selection of Tagore’s poetry. She has also translated the poetry of Rumi.

In recent years, Vesna has written the Pentateuch (five books, which are collections and anthologies) totalling 4000 pages dedicated to human values and designed to provide assistance to teachers and parents. These works are in the service of the belief that improving character is the main objective of education. They include stories, proverbs, songs and games, as well as vignettes of life lived all over the world and throughout time. This concept of education has already been accepted and introduced in many schools in England, USA, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Italy, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Zambia, Australia, and elsewhere-46 countries in all. The author of this approach to education is Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba.