Slovakia

Ivana Dobrakovová is a Slovak writer and translator based in Turin. Her literary debut, a collection of short stories entitled Prvá smrť v rodine  / First Death in the Family (2009), was shortlisted for the Anasoft Litera prize and won a Ján Johanides Award in the category Best Fiction by a Young Writer. Her second novel, Bellevue (2010), also nominated for the Anasoft Litera, portrays the experience of a young Slovak woman who has a nervous breakdown after taking a summer job in an international youth camp at a centre for disabled people near Marseille.

Svetlana Žuchová, born in 1976, studied psychology at Vienna University and medicine at the Medical Faculty of Comenius University in Bratislava. She works at a psychiatric clinic in Prague. Her stories have been published in journals including Dotyky, Rak, Romboid, Vlna, OS and the weekly Slovo.

Pavol Rankov (b. 1964) is a writer of prose fiction, essayist, journalist, information scientist and university pedagogue. After completing his secondary schooling in Bratislava he studied library science at the Philosophical Faculty of Bratislava's Comenius University (1983-1987). He worked as a methodologist in the Slovak National Library in Martin (1987-1990) and in the Slovak Pedagogic Library in Bratislava (1991-1992). From 1993 he has worked at the Department of Library Science and Scientific Information at Comenius University in Bratislava.