She graduated in dramaturgy at the Zagreb Academy of Dramatic Arts, and in 2004 she received her master’s degree from the Goldsmiths College in London, at the Department of Dramatic Writing. She wrote the first play You can escape from Sunday in the third year of dramaturgy. The play was premiered the same year at the ZKM Theater and won the Rector’s and Marin Držić Awards. This was followed by a series of new performances, editions and translations, as well as drama in theater and radio, in Croatia and throughout Europe. You Can’t Escape from Sunday is one of her most performed dramas. The play Two premiered at the Atelje 212 Theater in Belgrade in 2003. It was the first new Croatian drama performed on the Serbian stage after the break-up of Yugoslavia. The first year of her stay in London inspired the drama Fragile! The premiere of the play at the Youth Theater in Ljubljana was named the best play of the year at the Borštink Festival in Slovenia. Fragile! has been performed in a number of European countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria and Turkey, and BBC Radio4; it has been translated into several languages and has won many awards, including the European Authors’ Award and the Innovative Dramatic Text Award at the Heidelberg Stückemarkt 2008. Tena Štivičić’s plays have been published in numerous anthologies and collections of plays. Her drama Three Winters, which follows four generations of the Zagreb family during the turbulent twentieth century, premiered at the National Theater in London in 2014, directed by the celebrated Howard Davies, and won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Award for Best Drama in 2015. She worked as a dramaturg on numerous performances, including Patrick Marber’s Closer at the Gavella Theater, Romeo and Juliet ’68. and Cabaret Brecht at the Ulysses Theater and the ballet The Cat in Boots at the Zagreb HNK. For the play Drunk Night 1918, Tena Štivičić won the Dramaturgy Award at the Festival of Small Stages in Rijeka in 2008. In 2010, she published a short story in the anthology London 33, published by Glasshouse Books. Since 2003, Tena Štivičić has been writing a column in the magazine Zaposlena. The columns were published in two collections: Odbrojavanje (2007) and Vrag ne spava (2010), in the publishing house Profil.
