Balla: A hopeless Escape
– Slovakia
Born in 1967 in Nové Zámky. He is a graduate of the University of Economics in Bratislava. He made his debut with the short story prose Leptokaria [Leptokaria] (1996), which is dominated by an absurd atmosphere and themes of the meaning of human existence. A year later, he won the Poviedka [Short Story] competition, followed by the publication of several prose books. An important work is the experimental novel V mene otca [In the Name of the Father] (2011), which reflects the life of a man in a retirement age. For this book he received the Anasoft Litera Award and the Tatra Bank Foundation Award for Art in the literature category. Other successful titles followed, such as Veľká láska [Great Love] (2015) or Je mŕtvy [He’s Dead] (2018). He is one of the most translated authors of the contemporary Slovak literature and he is currently working on a new book.