Among The Ruins

BALLA (b. 8 May 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 Nové Zámky, a provincial town in southern Slovakia. Since his first short story collection, Leptokaria (1996), he has published thirteen more books, mostly of short fiction. His works have been translated into Czech, German, English, Greek, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Slovene, Ukrainian 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. Balla’s latest, the novella Medzi Ruinami [Among the Ruins] was published in 2021 and was also shortlisted for Anasoft Litera.

David Short graduated with a BA in Russian with French from the University of Birmingham in 1965 and spent 1966–72 in Prague studying, working, translating and having fun. He then taught Czech and Slovak at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London from 1973 to 2011. He has translated a wide range of literary and non-literary Czech texts including Prague. I see a city… by Daniela Hodrová and Bliss was it in Bohemia by Michal Viewegh, both published by Jantar. He has won awards both for translations and for his contribution to Czech and Slovak studies, notably in 2004 the Czech Minister of Culture’s Artis Bohemicae Amicus medal and the Medal of the Comenius University in Bratislava.