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 Nové Zámky, a provincial town in southern Slovakia. Since his first short story collection, Leptokaria (1996), he has published over a dozen more books, mostly of short fiction. His works have been translated into fourteen languages. 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. The novella Veľká láska (Big Love), was published in 2016 and was also shortlisted for Anasoft Litera, as was his most recent book, Medzi ruinami (Amidst the Ruins), published in 2021.