Contemporary Croatian literature is a reflection of tempestuous time in Croatian history. Literature in general is always intertwined with social-political happenings so in order to understand a piece of literature, the historical circumstances in which the piece was created need to be taken into consideration. The short overview of the recent Croatian literature is followed by Croatian poetry of the second half of the 20th century to get a precise insight into literary practice of Zvonimir Balog, what is the subject of this Final Thesis. It is preferable to know something about the poets who write their works before the appearance of Balog, and about his contemporaries, so in this work the main poetic features of the more relevant authors have been presented, starting with Jure Kaštelan and Vesna Parun over the poets whose works were published in the magazines Krugovi and Razlog, all the way to Danijel Dragojević and Arsen Dedić. Since Zvonimir Balog is more known as a writer for children and his works made a large contribution to the Croatian children’s literature, defining the children’s literature and a short overview of its history are both included in this work. This is followed by the overview of the Croatian children’s literature with the most important names, such as Ivan Filipović, Krunoslav Kuten, Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, Vladimir Nazor, Jagoda Truhelka, Mato Lovrak, Zlata Kolarić-Kišur and Grigor Vitez, and their most significant pieces. The children’s writers and their works are grouped into the periods of Croatian children’s literature: Period of Filipović, Period of Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, Period of Lovrak and Period of Vitez. Zvonimir Balog comes after Vitez, he continues his word play and develops it. His style has become so recognizable that it has its own adjective – ‘balogljiv’ which means ‘Balog-like’ – and the writers who imitate him are called Balogovci. The features of his style are poetic ludism, humour, language innovations and innovations in the poem and short stories’ organization, their cycles and collections, and novels. His poetic works are divided into three stages which differ in language expression – in some poems the poetic ludism dominates while in others it does not. Nearly all of his works are mentioned and described in this work, with the emphasis on the collection of poems Nevidljiva Iva, children's novel Bosonogi general and a novel for adults Predživot. Works of Zvonimir Balog are appreciable for its visual, semantic, audio plays, simplicity, unforseen puns and making the ordinary, everyday events seem extraordinary and unbelievable.