Drago Štambuk

Drago Štambuk (born September 20, 1950) is a Croatian physician, poet, essayist and an ambassador.

Štambuk was born in Selca on the island of Brač. He attended the gymnasium in Split, and the University of Zagreb School of Medicine.

He specialised internal medicine, gastroenterology and hepatology in Zagreb, but worked and lived in London since 1983, where he was engaged in research of the diseases of liver and AIDS. At that early stage of awareness of HIV/AIDS, Dr. Štambuk was among the first researchers deeply engaged in trying to understand the now widely known and ubiquitous disease.

After Croatia declared its independence in 1991, he turned to diplomacy. In the sensitive period from 1991 until 1994, he served as the Croatian ambassador to the United Kingdom. Afterwards, he became ambassador to India and Sri Lanka (1995–1998), Egypt (1998–2000) and a number of Arab countries. He has been ambassador to Japan and South Korea from 2005 to 2010, and to Brazil from 2011. Dr Štambuk has published more than 40 books of poetry, which have been widely translated, and is regarded one of the leading Croatian contemporary poets. Raymond Carver named him the real poet. His English books include Incompatible Animals (1995), Black Wave (2009), And the Sea is no More (2011), as well as contributions to the magazine Ploughshares; "Language of Dismemberement/Loghat Al-Tamazzuq"(2000) in Arabic, "El viento de las estrellas oscuras"(2003) in Spanish with the forward by Antonio Skarmeta, "Pierre Nocturne"(2009) in French, "Black Wave/Kuroi Nami"(2009) and "From Nowhere/Museki Yori"(2011) in Japanese. He has been granted many international and national literary, arts and peace awards.

References

• Štambuk, Drago (January 15, 2009), "Danas je istina u egzilu" (in Croatian), Vijenac (399), http://www.matica.hr/Vijenac/vijenac388.nsf/AllWebDocs/Danas_je_istina_u_egzilu 
• Metayer, Guillaume (November 4, 2009), "Etika pažnje (Pierre Nocture / Noćni kamen), Paris 2009" (in Croatian), Vijenac (409), http://www.matica.hr/Vijenac/vijenac409.nsf/AllWebDocs/Poetska_etika_paznje 
• Gaborro, Allen (February 26, 2010), "The Poetry of Drago Štambuk", Ambassadeur, foreign affairs magazine, March–April 2010, http://www.envoy.jp/2010/02/the-poetry-of-drago-stambuk 
• Gallagher, Tess (January 14, 2008), "Tess Gallagher's speech at presentation of Drago Štambuk's poetry in Pula", Croatian World Network]], http://www.croatia.org/crown/articles/9432/ 
• Ishiai, Tsutomu (March 16, 2010), "Black Wave Selected Poems of Drago Štambuk" (in Japanese), Asahi Shimbun, http://globe.asahi.com/author/100308/01_01.html 
• Štambuk, Drago (25. June 2010.), "Croatia-Japan, a beautiful friendship", The Japan Times (The Japan Times), http://classified.japantimes.com/nationalday/pdfs/20100625-croatia.pdf. 
• Štambuk, Drago (22. August 2011.), "Haiku Consciousness", issuu (iafor), http://issuu.com/iafor/docs/stambuk_keynote_2011. 
• (in Croatian & English) Embassy of the Republic of Croatia, Tokyo, http://jp.mvp.hr 

Persondata
Name	Štambuk, Drago
Alternative names
Short description	Croatian physician and ambassador
Date of birth	September 20, 1950
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death