Jana Beňová is a poet and a fiction writer. She has graduated from the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. Her first poetry collection Svetloplachý (Lucifugous) came out in 1993. Two poetry collections followed in 1997: Lonochod (Wombokhod) and Nehota (Loveful Naked). All three books are “travelogues” of interpersonal relationships, loves, details and life observations. She published her fiction debut, Parker (Ľúbostný román) / Parker (A Love Story) in 2001. In 2003 the collection of short stories Dvanásť poviedok a Ján Med (Twelve Stories and Jan Med) came out, a book marked by sensitivity bound with a poignant, peculiar insight into the human mind and behavior. Plán odprevádzania/Café Hyena (Seeing People Off, subtitled Café Hyena, 2008) is a peculiar mosaic of mini-stories, observations, perceptions, self-reflections and memories from which a relationship between a young woman and an aging man emerges. The second edition of the novel with the reversed title: Café Hyena (Seeing People Off) was published in 2012 and received the European Union Prize for Literature. The same year, Beňová’s book Preč! Preč! (Away! Away!) appeared. The books Seeing People Off. Café Hyena (2008), Away! Away! (2012), HoneymOon (2015) are all carried by a vague and genre-less search for relationships between people, things and words in general. In doing so, Beňová discovers both the importance of the overlooked and the irrelevance of the previously important. For her book Flaneur's Shirt (2020) she spent several months wandering the streets and suburbs of the Slovak capital, in a book of short stories entitled Vandala (2021) she captures various forms of vandalism in relationships, and her most recent publication so far is a book of interviews in the park (2023) with ten personalities and friends, originally published in the late 1990s and during the first years of the new millennium in the literary and photographic magazine Park.
