Pavol Rankov was born on 16 September 1964 in Poprad. After completing his grammar school education he went on to study library science at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava. After graduating he worked for a short time as a methodologist at the Slovak National Library in Martin and at the Slovak Pedagogic Library in Bratislava. Since 1993 he has worked in the Department of Library and Information Science at the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University, where he now holds the post of Associate Professor. He lives in Bratislava.
Pavol Rankov is a fiction writer, essayist and journalist. His literary debut, the short-stories collection S odstupom času (At a Distance in Time, 1995), is written in the tradition of magic realism. It uses elements of mystery, mystification, irrationality and concludes with a startling punch line, that over time proved to be typical for Rankov. The collection received the Ivan Krasko Prize for best debut and the Jean Monnet Premio Letterario Internazionale award. His first novel Stalo sa prvého septembra (alebo inokedy) / It Happened on the First of September (Or Some Other Time) was published in 2008. The story of three friends, a Czech, a Jew and a Hungarian who share a love for a girl, spans across three decades (1938–1968), highlighting some of the most important dates in Slovak history, including both the Nazi and Russian occupations. The novel was awarded the EU Prize for Literature in 2009. Rankov's second novel, Matky (Mothers, 2011) examines motherhood in the extreme conditions of a Soviet Gulag after WWII. He returned to the shorter form in 2013 with the collection of stories Na druhej strane (On the Other Side). His most recent work counts the novel Miesta, čo nie sú na mape (Places That Aren’t on the Map, 2017) and the historically inclined Legenda o jazyku (Legend of a Language, 2018).
