That's a difficult question. Most popular "Croatian" authors are communist that insert propaganda into their work, mainly "muh evil aristocracy keeping the peasants down n sheeiit". Basically if you weren't a communist and pushing their crap, you were more or less forbidden for publishing any work or holding any literacy posts.
Yugoslavia was a lot worse than Soviet Union in a lot of things, especially censorship. You could end up in prison camp for speaking in a too latinic dialect that wasn't slavic enough, or God forbid singing the wrong songs.
Decent authors that come to mind are Ivana Brlic - Mazuranic, she is considered a "children's writer" because she writes folk tales, but is still very interesting read about Croatian folklore.
Then a poet Augustin (Tin) Ujevic who held a post as a translator in NDH (Nazi Croatia) and was punished by Yugoslavs by ban on publishing, but after some time it was lifted due to his previous popularity. Here, I found some poems of his translated to English: https://www.sic-journal.org/Article/Index/139
This one is a good book and I liked reading it, but later it got sour when I realized that it's just another muh aristocracy bad propaganda - https://www.britannica.com/topic/U-registraturi
Excellent. Will check
(post is archived)