Barbara Matejčić is an award-winning Croatian freelance journalist, non-fiction writer and audio producer.
Based in Zagreb, Croatia, Barbara Matejčić focuses on social issues and human rights in the Balkan region. She has won the European Press Prize (2004, and she was a finalist for the European Press Prize in 2021) and the Investigative Journalism for Europe Award (2024). She teaches at the Department of Journalism at the University of Zagreb. She writes for Croatian and international print and online media and produces multimedia projects. Her work has been pusblished in the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, TV Arte, the Austrian weekly Profil, the Italian weekly L’Espresso, the German daily Neues Deutschland, the Dutch weekly De Groene Amsterdammer, Balkan Insight and others. Barbara has worked with leading international organisations, institutions and think tanks such as the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Roma Education Fund, Friedrich Ebert Foundation, European Stability Initiative, European Trade Union Institute, UNHCR, UNICEF.
In 2013, she was awarded the Krunoslav Sukic prize for the promotion of peace, non-violence and human rights for her journalistic work on war trauma, reconciliation and peace-building initiatives in former Yugoslavia. In 2014, she won the Croatian Journalists’ Association award as the best print journalist in Croatia for her reporting on post-war societies in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. She was awarded for the best coverage of LGBT issues in Croatia the last decade (2000-2010).
Her non-fiction book “Kako ste?” [“How are you?”], published by the German Heinrich Böll Foundation (first edition 2015, second edition 2016), looks at the fate of so-called second-class citizens who are often invisible to most of society.
She was selected for several European fellowships („Milena Jesenska“ Fellowship, German Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”, German Heinrich Böll Foundation, Austrian ERSTE Foundation and German Robert Bosch Foundation).
Barbara has a degree in Croatian Language and Literature from the University of Zagreb.
