Jozef Banáš (born in 1948) is one of the best-selling and most translated Slovak writers. He is an eight-time recipient of the Golden Book Award, a six-time recipient of the Platinum Book Award, and has also been honored with the SC PEN Award, the Slovenské pohľady Award, the Panta Rhei Awards, the Reader’s Top Title Award, the Book of the Year Award, the Kysuce Book Award, the Ladislav Ťažký Golden Pen Award, the Vladimír Ferko Prize, the Slovak Avatar Award, and the main prize of the Literary Fund for his novel I’ll Break Through! Stefanik – A Man of Iron Will (Prebijem sa! Štefánik), which became recommended literature in secondary schools in 2020.
For the film Beginning of the Season (Začiatok sezóny), he won the main prize at the Parco Mondo Film Festival in Varallo Sesia, Italy, in 1989, as well as the second prize, the Silver Bunch, at the 15th International Film Festival in Santarém, Portugal.
In 2011, his novel Jubilation Zone (Zóna nadšenia) entered the final round of the German Johann Gottfried Seume Literary Prize. In 2020, he received the Russian National Award for his novel I’ll Break Through! Stefanik and the Czech Václav Matěj Kramerius Prize. Since 2024, he has been a recipient of the Matej Hrebenda Prize, awarded by the Slovak community in the Czech Republic for his contribution to the development of Czech-Slovak relations. In 2024, he was also honored with the Personality of Bratislava Award.
His novel Code 1 was published by India’s largest publishing house, Rajpal & Sons. The magazine of the Spanish Royal Football Federation, Fútbol, featured his short story Messi’s Miracle. In 2019, Odeon published his translation of Stefan Zweig’s essay Vor dem Sturm (Before the Storm).
He has achieved remarkable success with his biographical and motivational novels I’ll Break Through! Stefanik and I’m Bata! I Can Do It. In 2021, readers voted him among the top three most popular Slovak writers in the Panta Rhei Awards, alongside Dominik Dán and Milan Lasica. He repeated this success in 2024, when the top three included him, Dominik Dán, and Boris Filan.
Jozef Banáš has published forty-four books, twenty-five of which have been released abroad. Many of them have reached tens of thousands of copies sold—his novel Code 9, with over 55,000 copies sold, is one of the most successful novels in Slovak literary history. He participates in around eighty discussions and book signings annually and has lectured and discussed his books in twenty countries.
Curriculum Vitae
Jozef was born in Bratislava, Slovakia on September 27th, 1948. And although he has traveled the world throughout his life, Slovakia has always remained his home where he works and lives with his wife Maria Banasova (a famous Slovak ceramics artist). He has two daughters, Maria Zinburgova (1974) and Adela Banasova (1980).
After the completion of foreign trade studies at the Business College of the University in Bratislava, Slovakia in 1972, he worked as a top manager in the fields of foreign trade (Chirana export Piestany) and leasing (Raiffeisen – Tatraleasing), as well as in the tobacco industry (Reemtsma Hamburg – Slovak International Tabak). From 1983 until 1988, he served as a press attaché in the Czechoslovak Embassy in the German Democratic Republic and after the fall of the communist regime in 1989, he worked as the Czechoslovak Chargé d’affaires in Austria from 1990 until 1992.
In 2002, Jozef Banas was elected Member of the Slovak National Parliament (liberal party ANO). He achieved a major success in parliamentary diplomacy as he became the first Slovak Member of Parliament (MP) ever to lead two Permanent Delegations of the National Council simultaneously – the Permanent Delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly (PA) of the Council of Europe and to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. In 2004, he was elected the first Slovak MP to hold the post of the Vice-President of the NATO PA.
In 2006, he ended his professional activities and has since devoted himself exclusively to writing.
Literary critics talk about Jozef Banas as the man who has jumped on the train of Slovak literature at full speed, taking a seat right in the locomotive.
Membership
Slovak Writers’ Society