Her father Vladimir Mažuranić was a writer, lawyer and historian who wrote Prinosi za hrvatski pravno-povjestni rječnik (Croatian dictionary for history and law) in 1882.

Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić started writing poetry, diaries and essays rather early but her works were not published until the beginning of the 20th century.

Her book Croatian Tales of Long Ago (Priče iz davnine), published in 1916, is among the most popular today in large part because of its adaptation into a computerized interactive fiction product by Helena Bulaja in 2003/2006.

It was this that earned her comparisons to Hans Christian Andersen and Tolkien who also wrote completely new stories but based in some elements of real mythology.

The Marvelous Adventures and Misadventures of Hlapić the Apprentice was translated, among other languages, into Bengali (by Dr. Probal Dashgupta), Hindi, Chinese (by Shi Cheng Tai), Vietnamese (a few chapters), Turkish,[11] Japanese (by Sekoguchi Ken) and Parsi (by Achtar Etemadi).

[clarification needed] In the 1990s, the Croatia Film company adapted Brlić-Mažuranić's work The Marvellous Adventures and Misadventures of Hlapić the Apprentice as a children's animated feature, Lapitch the Little Shoemaker.

[19] Milan Blažeković, the director of Lapitch, has been developing another animated adaptation of her works since 2000, Tales of Long Ago (Priče iz davnine).