BALLA (1967), who goes only by his surname, is a graduate of the Bratislava Economic University and has a day job in the local council's audit office in Nove Zamky, a provincial town in southern Slovakia. Since his first short story collection, Leptokaria (1996), he has published twelve more books, mostly of short fiction. His works have been translated into Czech, German, English, Hungarian, Polish, Ukrainian, Slovene and Serbian. The novella V mene otca (2012, In the Name of the Father) was voted Book of the Year by the Slovak daily SME in 2012 and in the same year awarded both the Tatrabanka Foundation Art Prize for literature and Anasoft Litera Prize, Slovakia's most prestigious literary prize. Velka laska (Big Love), was first published in 2016 and was also shortlisted for Anasoft Litera.
