page_title: Joža Horvat
section_title: Life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Joža Horvat / Life and career
caption_attribution_description: English: Franjo Tuđman (later first Croatian President) and Joža Horvat (later Croatian writer) in February 1945Hrvatski: Politički komesar brigade s rangom majora Franjo Tuđman i kapetan Joža Horvat snimljeni u veljači 1945.
context_page_description: Josip "Joža" Horvat was a Croatian writer. He was the author of many novels, short stories, dramas, screenplays, essays and radio dramas, translated into at least nine languages, including Russian, Chinese and Esperanto.
context_section_description: Horvat was born in Kotoriba, Međimurje, northern Croatia, at the time in Zala County in Hungary.
  During World War II he fought in Yugoslav Partisans, which later inspired the  novel Mačak pod šljemom (Tomcat under a Helmet, 1962) which had a somewhat ironical view of the partisan movement, adapted both into a feature film and a miniseries.  The screenplay Ciguli Miguli (1952), critical of bureaucracy, briefly brought him into disfavour with the Communist party authorities, on which occasion he turned to sailing.
  In mid-1960s Horvat and his family sailed the world in the sailing yacht Besa, and his travel journal Besa–brodski dnevnik (Besa–Ship's Log, 1973) became a best-seller.  The second trip around the world was marked by tragedy: Horvat’s older son, who stayed back, died in a traffic accident in 1973, and his younger son drowned in Venezuela in 1975.
  After a period of deep crisis Horvat published two acclaimed novels inspired by these events, Operacija "Stonoga" (Operation "Centipede", 1982), about a search for a lost island in the Atlantic, and Waitapu (1984), about a Pacific Islander boy who decides to sail across a taboo line. His last work is a memoir titled Svjedok prolaznosti (A Witness to Impermanence, 2005).
  Horvat attended the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb and served as a secretary of Matica hrvatska.
caption: Joža Horvat (right) and Franjo Tuđman in February 1945
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