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.
Peter Sherwood studied Hungarian and linguistics in the University of London before being appointed, in 1972, to a lectureship in Hungarian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (now part of University College London). He taught there until 2007. From 2008 until his retirement in 2014 he was László Birinyi, Sr., Distinguished Professor of Hungarian Language and Culture in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Peter Sherwood received the Pro Cultura Hungarica prize of the Hungarian Republic for contributions to Anglo-Hungarian relations in 2001, the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic in 2007, the János Lotz medal of the International Association for Hungarian Studies in 2011, the László Országh prize of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English in 2016, and the Árpád Tóth Prize for Translation in 2020.
