Zdravko Škender

Zdravko Škender is a Croatian singer of popular music, born in Skradin and raised in Šibenik. Since the 1980s he has sung Dalmatian love songs, with hits such as "Ne mogu da te zaboravim", "Suze ljubavi", "Ako nas život rastavi" and "Žena kao ti".

His talent showed early. As a boy he played jazz trumpet in the Šibenik brass band, and he trained as a footballer with NK Šibenik. He later founded the group Ad Astra, in which he played bass and sang backing vocals, though the band stayed a local name. In 1980 a traffic accident in Montenegro, in which a friend of his died, left him unable to walk, and that same year he began his solo career.

The breakthrough came in 1988. At the Split festival he was second with "Ne mogu da te zaboravim" and third with "Zlatno sunce Dalmacije", and at the Zagreb festival "Suze ljubavi" won the Grand Prix. The album Suze ljubavi (Jugoton, 1988) sold about 400,000 copies. It followed Ne mogu te zaboraviti (1986) and Ljubavi se po pjesmama pamte (1987), and Sreća je došla s tobom (1989) and S druge strane sreće (1991) came after it.

In the 1990s he recorded Dirnut ću ti dušu (1994), Čovjek bez sna (1995), Pogledaj me životu u oči (1997) and Nakon svih tih godina (1998), later Pusti da živim (2006) and Knjiga života (2011), with songs by writers such as Đorđe Novković, Zdenko Runjić, Tomislav Zuppa and Nenad Ninčević. He also sang at Melodije Mostara, the Zadar festival and Od srca srcu, where he shared an award for the best songs of the year in 2008.

Zdravko Škender has toured widely for Croatian communities abroad, on every continent, and has been especially popular in Australia.