Pavol Janík

is a Slovak writer and Secretary-General of the Slovak Writers' Society.

Mgr. art. Pavol Janik, PhD., was born in 1956 in Bratislava, where he also studied film and television dramaturgy and scriptwriting at the Drama Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (VSMU). He has worked at the Ministry of Culture (1983-87), in the media and in advertising. President of the Slovak Writers' Society (2003-07) and the Secretary-General of the SWS (1998-2003, 2007 - ). He has received a number of awards for his literary and advertising work both in his own country and abroad.

This virtuoso of Slovak literature, Pavol Janík, poet, dramatist, prose writer, translator, publicist and copywriter was born on 15. 10. 1956. His literary activities focus mainly on poetry. Even his first book of poems, which appeared a quarter of a century ago, attracted the attention of the leading authorities in Slovak literary circles. He presented himself as a plain-spoken poet with a spontaneous manner of poetic expression and an inclination for irony directed not only at others, but also at himself. This style has become typical of all his work, which in spite of its critical character has also acquired a humorous, even bizarre dimension. His manner of expression is becoming terse to the point of being aphoristic. It is thus perfectly natural that Pavol Janík's literary interests should come to embrace aphorisms founded on a shift of meaning in the form of puns. In his work he is gradually raising some very disturbing questions and pointing to serious problems concerning the further development of humankind, while all the time widening his range of themes and styles. Literary experts liken Janík's poetic virtuosity to that in the work of Miroslav Válek, while in the opinion of the Russian poet, translator and literary critic, Natalia Shvedova, Válek is more profound and Janík more inventive. He has translated in poetic form several collections of poetry and written works of drama with elements of the style of the Theatre of the Absurd. Pavol Janík's literary works have been published not only in Slovakia, but also in Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, India, Macedonia, Romania, the Russian Federation, Serbia, South Korea, Ukraine, United Kingdom and the United States of America.