Barbora Hrínová

Barbora Hrínová (b. 1984) is a Slovak fiction and script writer. A graduate of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, she currently teaches scriptwriting at her alma mater. She has written for Slovak TV and radio and been on study visits to the US and Georgia. Her first collection of short stories, Unicorns (2020), garnered Slovakia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Anasoft Litera. Her stories feature contemporary thirty- and forty-somethings and explore cultural and generational issues, highlighting various forms of otherness, such as loneliness, LGBTQI people and their relationships, present-day nomads, and existential uncertainty.

With her second book, the critically acclaimed autofictional novel The Shy House (2025), Hrínová has cemented her unique standing in the Slovak literary scene as a writer with a special gift for crafting sensitive portrayals of non-conformity and depicting ordinary human problems with empathy and subtle humor, avoiding the pitfalls of sentimentality.