Mirko Galić

Mirko Galić (1945) is a long-time journalist who began writing professionally at the age of twenty-three for the then leading republican newspaper Vjesnik and continues to write regularly for Večernji list, with which he has also had a long-standing collaboration, even at the age of 80. He was a Paris correspondent for these two newspapers on two occasions, for a total of 14 years. He also reported on programs for Croatian Radio and Croatian Television during the Homeland War. For most of his journalistic career, he wrote reports, featurettes, commentaries and columns. He has published hundreds of interviews with famous figures, mostly from Croatia and France, and has collected them in three books (Mirror over Croatia, Politics in Emigration, Second reading). From 1985 to 1988, at a critical time of the Yugoslav crisis and the awakening of democratic aspirations, he was the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Danas, a weekly during the period of "Croatian silence" played a major role in opposing Great Serbian ideas. He was the head of HRT from 2000 to 2007, as a non-partisan person during the SDP and HDZ governments, promoting the ideas and practice of public media, independent of the authorities. He was named journalist of the year in 1988 for editing the newspaper Danas, and in 1995 he received the "Otokar Keršovani" Lifetime Achievement Award for his overall journalistic work. From 2007 to 2012, he was the ambassador of the Republic of Croatia to France and to UNESCO. At that time, the Festival of Croatian Culture was held in Paris, a multi-month event that has not been held in any other foreign country before or since.