Ondrej Štefánik: The Decay of the World
– Slovakia
Born in 1978 in Bratislava, where he studied culturology and marketing communication at the Faculty of Arts of the Comenius University. He made his debut with a collection of short stories Pštrosí muž [Ostrich Man] (2011), where he thematizes the effort to escape from the existential crisis in absurd ways. He continues with the detective novel Bezprsté mesto [Fingerless City] (2012), which is full of conversations in a pub and hardships of the people currently in their thirties. In 2017, he won the Anasoft Litera Award with his novel Som Paula [I’m Paula], which he captures the destructive consequences of the difficult time we live in. In the end, the book flirts with the sci-fi genre and takes the story to a whole new dimension. The author considers himself a sceptic, smokes a lot and works as a copywriter in his own advertising agency. However, he does not lack humor with a certain dose of cynicism and can aptly capture the situation.