Tonko Maroević was born in 1941 in Split, where he also did his primary and secondary education. In 1963 he took a degree from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb University, majoring in comparative literature and art history. In 1976 he took a doctorate with a dissertation on Fine Arts in Croatian Literature since the Modern Period.
He has been an assistant at the chair of medieval history, a lector in Croatian, an associate for the documentation of modern art. He has taught at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb and at the universities in Milan and Trieste.
Since 1970 he has worked in the Institute for the History of Art in Zagreb. He has been a full fellow of the Croatian Academy since 2002. He does research into contemporary Croatian art, publishes art criticism and treatises, forewords to catalogues, albums and monographs. As well as with the fine arts, he is engaged in literary writing, translation and literary criticism.
He has published several books of poems (Blind Eye; Genevieve Motif; Trace of Horn Not Without Devil; Four Handed; Sonnet Discipline; Black and Light; Verses of Occasion and others. He compiled the anthology of Croatian poetry 1971-1995 Exclamations, and is author of the book of criticism Click – momentary images of Croatian poetry (1988-1998), 1998; and an anthology of Catalan poetry Bull’s Hide (1987).
He has written several monographs on art – on N. Kurtović Kavurić, Z. Kauzlarić Atač, Vojin Bakić, Antun Zuppa, Vojo Radoičić; Ante Kaštelančić; Zlatko Šimunović and many others.
He has received numerous prizes and recognitions for his work: the Seven Secretaries Prize for art criticism; the Antun Gustav Matoš Prize for literature; the J. Benešić Prize for literature criticism; the Maslinov vijenac - Masle Wreath; and the Tin Ujević Poetry Prize.

NB. Data taken from the questionnaire, material taken from the Personnel Archives of the MDC, and from an interview recorded on February 13, 2002.