BRAK is a Slovak publishing house founded in 2015. We publish fiction, poetry, graphic novels and children’s books, bringing together Slovak voices and international literature.
Our ALMA children’s imprint, launched in 2020, features original stories and illustrated books by authors and artists including Andrej Dúbravský, Mirka Ábelová, Tereza Oľhová, Eva Škandíková, Marek Vadas and Daniela Olejníková. Our comics list includes RUDO, ZÓNA and GEMER by Slovak author and illustrator Daniel Majling, alongside works by Marek Hudec and Natali Žemberová.
Explore our original Slovak writing for children and adults. The editions presented below are in Slovak; the English descriptions introduce them to international readers, publishers and literary partners. English titles are working translations for this catalogue, with the original Slovak titles shown beneath. Proper names and titles already suitable for English are retained.
Rights & international enquiries
Stories, poetry and illustrated adventures for young readers.
Alica a hmyz
Andrej Dúbravský
Children’s book · 2026 · 64 pages
Alica is a curious cat who lives with the equally curious Andrej. Both are fascinated by insects. On her adventures, Alica discovers fungi that turn insects into zombies, beetles that make devoted parents, and ants that farm aphids. With his distinctive humour and visual style, Andrej Dúbravský brings together a love of cats, a passion for insects and the pleasure of looking closely at nature.
Deň otvorených dverí
Marek Vadas
Illustrated by Daniela Olejníková
Children’s book · 2025 · 40 pages
An open day is always a big occasion—especially at the zoo. The animals are busy preparing, and the whole town is on its feet. But things do not quite go according to plan. What follows gives children a chance to discover essential life skills and learn that freedom is not only precious: it can also be tremendous fun. Following their collaborations on Útek and Krutá Marta, Marek Vadas and Daniela Olejníková return with another shared adventure.
Svetlanka a les
Mirka Ábelová
Illustrated by Hedviga Gutierrez
Children’s book · 2025 · 40 pages
In a magical forest, fireflies glow and woodland creatures rustle through the undergrowth. But the giant Lotor is burning trees to produce energy, putting their home at risk. Svetlanka the firefly and her friends must find another way. A meeting with a wise owl reveals the possibilities of sun and wind in this gentle story about protecting the natural world.
Vyletela guľa z dela
Ľubomír Feldek
Illustrated by Miroslav Cipár
Children’s book · 2025 · 28 pages
What happens when a cannonball flies through an entire book? It leaves a hole—in the sky, in the water, in a town, and even in a poet’s head. Conceived by Ľubomír Feldek and illustrator Miroslav Cipár almost sixty years before its publication, this playful book finally brings their once technically impossible idea to life.
O tme a veľkom človeku
Michal Hlatký
Illustrated by Nicol Hochholczerová
Children’s book · 2023 · 45 pages
Every respectable city Darkness swallows up homes as soon as their inhabitants switch off the lights. But what if one apartment stays lit for three nights in a row? Darkness is in trouble at work, and the head of the College of Night Darkness is furious. A certain Konštantín is behind it all in this imaginative story for readers aged eight and up.
OFFroad
Zuzana Líšková
Illustrated by Viliam Slaminka
Children’s book · 2023 · 56 pages
When national park rangers Gerhard and Frenky discover a rusty old car in the forest, they have no idea how much it will change their lives. A near-impossible repair leads to a wild ride through beautiful countryside—and an unexpected search for friendship and understanding. An illustrated adventure about finding a way forward together.
Bubáci
Tereza Oľhová, Vlado Janček
Illustrated by Eva Škandíková
Children’s book · 2021 · 32 pages
Every home has its own little monsters. They lurk on balconies, in washing machines, beneath lifts—and perhaps right behind you. This playful picture book invites children to discover what these creatures get up to. Tereza Oľhová’s stories, Eva Škandíková’s illustrations and Vlado Janček’s verse combine gentle scares with plenty of laughter.
Zimná zmrzlináreň
Zuzana Líšková
Illustrated by Mária Kralovič
Children’s book · 2021 · 96 pages
When Mrs Mráziková opens an ice-cream parlour in winter, the neighbours think she must be mad. But customers arrive—and, more importantly, a remarkable circle of friends begins to form. This warm-hearted story shows how a scoop of ice cream and a little kindness can make room for people who struggle to fit in.
Posledný permoník
Tereza Oľhová
Illustrated by Eva Škandíková
Children’s book · 2020 · 136 pages
The last surviving mine sprite beneath Kremnica lives alone in an underground room, occasionally sneaking into people’s houses to read the newspapers. Eight-year-old Adam persuades him to venture outside after five hundred years. Shops, streetlights, football and cakes reveal a transformed world—and perhaps give him a reason to like humans again.
Pes Moko a jeho oko
Mirka Ábelová
Illustrated by Ivana Šáteková
Children’s book · 2020 · 88 pages
Moko has only one eye. Tired of being laughed at, he lives far away from everyone—until loneliness sends him on a quest for a new eye. At a fairground he meets little Vili, and together they encounter a host of unusual beings. Mirka Ábelová’s story in verse celebrates friendship, difference and the things that matter more than appearance.
Krutá Marta
Marek Vadas
Illustrated by Daniela Olejníková
Children’s book · 2020 · 40 pages
Marta loves playing with animals, but her games are not always kind. At her grandmother’s house, the creatures in the yard have given her a nickname: Cruel Marta. Now they have a big surprise in store for her. Marek Vadas’s story, illustrated by Daniela Olejníková, invites young readers to think about how they treat other living beings.
Útek
Marek Vadas
Illustrated by Daniela Olejníková
Children’s book · 2016 · 48 pages
A young boy and his dog Alan travel through cities, countries and continents, meeting both friendship and rejection. Their fantastic journey reveals the prejudices that make strangers unwelcome—and the excuses people find for ignoring another person’s fate. Marek Vadas and Daniela Olejníková create an imaginative story about displacement, empathy and the search for a place to belong.
Fiction, poetry, comics and non-fiction from our Slovak list.
Hypomnemata
Zuzana Husárová
Illustrated by Lucia Tallová
Poetry · 2024 · 64 pages
Created over a decade, this experimental collection assembles lived experiences, overheard conversations, fragments of writing and echoes of feminist thought, philosophy and media culture. Sound, performance and multiple languages run through the poems. Lucia Tallová’s visual artworks enter into dialogue with the texts, making the book a meeting place for poetry and visual art.
Malibu na Dunaji
Jana Juráňová
Fiction · 2025 · 208 pages
Eighteen stories explore lives shaped by memory, unfulfilled ambitions and unexpected encounters. For some characters, the present remains rooted in a youth spent under the grey skies of the totalitarian 1970s. For others, artistic aspirations struggle to find recognition today. Juráňová resists easy divisions between heroes and villains, portraying women and men with their contradictions intact. Animals, too, enter these stories, their fortunes sometimes becoming inseparable from those of their human companions.
Jozef & Lola
Emma Valéry
Fiction · 2026 · 104 pages
This cycle of short stories follows love affairs that have fallen apart and families struggling with the aftermath. Accumulated resentment, overwhelming intimacy and stubborn marital hostility share the page with a few dead relatives nobody remembers fondly—and the latest special offers. An intimate look at what remains when relationships break down.
Lujza mimo obrazu
Natali Žemberová
Comics & graphic novels · 2025 · 324 pages
Painting is the only thing Lujza has ever known how to do—and lately, it is the one thing she cannot do. Without motivation or inspiration, she drifts through a life arranged down to the last detail by her mother, withdrawing from both her career and the people around her. Then she meets Margo, a painter who could hardly be more different. As a prestigious competition offers a possible breakthrough, Lujza must confront a more fundamental question: what does art mean to her, and does she still want to pursue it?
Záznam o vzniku zvláštneho sveta
Mirka Ábelová
Poetry · 2026 · 152 pages
In her sixth poetry collection, Mirka Ábelová explores how childhood trauma shapes our emotional lives, our relationships and our ability to speak about pain. The collection unfolds in two parts. The first traces the gradual uncovering of a traumatic experience; the second turns to the intimate work of living in a world that has been irrevocably altered. One of Ábelová’s most personal books, it brings together the body, memory and the struggle to carry on.
Nerob s ňou rozhovor, je to feministka!
Jana Beňová
Non-fiction · 2024 · 240 pages
Jana Beňová talks to writer, translator and feminist cultural figure Jana Juráňová about literature, women’s rights and life in Slovakia. Beginning with the late 1960s, their conversation connects personal experience with wider cultural and social change. Period correspondence and photographs by Soňa Maletz accompany a portrait of a woman whose work has influenced several generations.
Obludárium
Weronika Gogola
Illustrated by Marek Cina
Fiction · 2025 · 28 pages
For centuries, bestiaries have offered more than descriptions of magical creatures: they have used fear and outrage to expose human failings. Weronika Gogola introduces eleven contemporary monsters whose raw monologues hold up a mirror to our times. Illustrated by Marek Cina, these creatures are disturbingly familiar—some walk among us, while others live within us.
Odchod Kim Kwang-Seona
Zuzana Šmatláková
Illustrated by Laci Palmai
Comics & graphic novels · 2025 · 46 pages
On a freezing January day, a woman arrives at a campus at the foot of the mountains to meet someone she has not seen for years. Hye-mi travels to remote Mohyeon to collect Kwang-seon for one final journey together. Palace courtyards, karaoke, frozen ponds and hot dumpling soup evoke the Seoul where they were once happy—and the difficulty of saying goodbye.
Porcelán
Veronika Kolejáková
Poetry · 2026 · 104 pages
Veronika Kolejáková’s debut poetry collection brings intimate experience into focus through an unsettling, almost clinical lens. The body is observed, classified and subjected to pressure, while also experienced from within as a place of vulnerability and tension. Women’s experiences of work, care and the shaping of the self intersect with family relationships and the strategies used to survive them. In schools, workplaces, homes and healthcare settings, everyday encounters reveal the fragile boundaries between adaptation, resistance and damage.
Spomienky Kornélie Wirtschafterovej
Oľga Bodorová
Non-fiction · 2025 · 155 pages
In the summer of 1944, eighteen-year-old student Kornélia Wirtschafterová was torn from her ordinary life and sent into a year of hunger, cold and suffering across four concentration camps. Decades later, she shares her memories with clarity and compassion. Recorded by Oľga Bodorová, her testimony bears witness to experiences that must never be forgotten.
Strieborná metalíza
Tomáš Hučko
Fiction · 2025 · 132 pages
For some, Slovakia’s 1990s evoke organised crime, political turmoil and everyday violence. For others, they bring back the image of an ailing father in a room steeped in old age. Tomáš Hučko’s intimate exploration of fatherhood places private memory beside collective history, tracing inheritance, illness and the lingering legacy of a turbulent decade.
Gemer
Daniel Majling
Comics & graphic novels · 2023 · 216 pages
On an August day in the Gemer region, a small boy falls into an uncovered shaft near Plešivec. The accident draws together an extraordinary cast: a pathologist mourning an imaginary romance with Natalie Portman, a police chief trying to identify a fake psychologist, and a psychiatric hospital director with amnesia. The opening volume of Daniel Majling’s graphic novel combines suspense, absurd turns and tragicomic dialogue.
Kosť & Koža
Agda Bavi Pain
Poetry · 2022 · 123 pages
First published in 2002, Agda Bavi Pain’s provocative poetry debut returns in an anniversary edition. Playful, inventive and deliberately subversive, these poems challenge literary convention and comfortable assumptions. The edition also includes the poetry booklet NAPR., extending the author’s experiments at the edge of language and provocation.
Na kolenách
Alica Cárska
Fiction · 2023 · 170 pages
A girl grows up in poverty in a small Slovak town, undermined by an unfeeling mother, cruel classmates and an insecure home life. As she becomes a woman, self-doubt hardens into guilt and blame. Seeking refuge in confessionals and anonymous hotel rooms, Alica struggles with a persistent question: can she take control of her own life?
NAPR.
Agda Bavi Pain
Poetry · 2022
A pocket-sized collection packed with coded references, hidden symbols and Agda Bavi Pain’s unmistakably provocative wordplay. Testing the boundaries of language and the rules of poetry, the author explores the fragile distinction between artistic expression and empty gesture. A compact continuation of his literary subversion.
Pohľady z mŕtveho uhla
Dušan Vicen
Fiction · 2022 · 271 pages
From the blind spots of other people’s lives, a narrator observes what they cannot see—or would rather conceal. Unexpected connections expose the distance between outward appearances and private realities. A judge, an unconventional companion and a conflicted wife inhabit a tragicomic world where desire and self-deception repeatedly upset the stories people tell about themselves.
Rozhovory v Parku
Jana Beňová
Non-fiction · 2023 · 176 pages
Conversations and photographic portraits first published in the magazine Park around the turn of the millennium are revisited more than twenty years later. New interviews with cultural figures, alongside the original material, trace changes in personal lives, creative work and Slovak society. The book turns the passage of time into a dialogue between past and present.
Veľká vzdialenosť
Marek Hudec
Illustrated by Eduard Klena
Comics & graphic novels · 2024 · 144 pages
Dominik and Tao meet through a dating app while on holiday. One lives in Bratislava, the other in Stockholm, but thousands of messages, video calls and carefully planned weekends make the distance feel manageable—until their relationship reaches a turning point. This original graphic novel explores queer love, acceptance and the challenge of finding a shared home across borders.
Zbierka zážitkovej poézie
Erik Šimšík
Poetry · 2023 · 69 pages
What might truly contemporary poetry look like? Erik Šimšík answers with seventy literary graphics combining poems, colour, collage and original illustration. References to popular culture, art and social problems meet the felt-tip-pen aesthetic of the housing estate where he grew up. Printed using risography, the collection brings literature and visual art together as a single experience.
Zbytočné pohyby
Tereza Oľhová
Illustrated by Slavomíra Ondrušová
Fiction · 2024 · 160 pages
Actress Lucia negotiates parenthood, uncertain work and the complications of one—or perhaps two—men. With irony and a sharp eye for detail, Tereza Oľhová connects ordinary actions with difficult decisions. Crisis becomes a way of testing personal limits, but also a space for hope and the search for a different version of oneself.
Žitava
Filip Németh
Poetry · 2023 · 99 pages
Filip Németh’s poetry debut maps a landscape while turning an equally attentive eye inward. Apparently ordinary places acquire a distinctive character through a mature poetic voice, subtle humour and careful observation. Rooted in a particular region, the collection reaches beyond it to address the pressures and vulnerabilities of contemporary life.
Dom
Mirka Ábelová
Illustrated by Ivana Šáteková, Katarína Janečková Walshe, Jana Farmanová
Poetry · 2022 · 136 pages
Mirka Ábelová’s fifth poetry collection follows three women in one village: an ageing woman whose house is falling apart, a young mother newly arrived from the city, and a woman on the outskirts whose life is disrupted by mysterious mice. Their stories meet in the idea of home—a place of safety and belonging that can also become a prison or a threat.
Možnosti neúspechu
Ivona Pekárková
Poetry · 2022 · 80 pages
A poetry collection about failure that is also, paradoxically, about success: the expectations society places on us and those we learn to impose on ourselves. Ivona Pekárková combines precise observation and humour with a deeper melancholy, questioning the promises of achievement and authority in a world increasingly aware of its own fragility.
Štyri nočné obdobia
Jozef Mokoš
Illustrated by Miloš Kopták
Poetry · 2022 · 320 pages
This collected edition brings together Jozef Mokoš’s four poetry collections, first published between 1962 and 2002. Illustrations by Miloš Kopták accompany the poems, while a selection of critical responses traces the reception of Mokoš’s work across four decades. A broad introduction to a distinctive voice in Slovak lyric poetry.
Zóna
Daniel Majling
Comics & graphic novels · 2018 · 176 pages
Daniel Majling sets his darkly comic mystery in the Zone, an enigmatic territory stretching between the Slovak town of Rimavská Sobota and London. The search for a missing friend becomes entangled with questions of truth, the meaning of life and humanity’s place in the universe. A graphic novel where local landscapes meet existential uncertainty and absurd humour.
Ruzká klazika
Daniel Majling
Fiction · 2017 · 118 pages
Daniel Majling’s satirical fiction plays with the prestige of Russian literary classics and the idea of their cheap imitations. Distorted author names and familiar grand themes—God, love, immortality, crime and punishment—become the material for an irreverent literary game. A mischievous exploration of cultural authority, imitation and the stories readers mistake for timeless wisdom.
RUDO
Daniel Majling
Comics & graphic novels · 2019 · 423 pages
Rudo bears a striking resemblance to his creator, writer and dramaturg Daniel Majling. Across fifteen comic stories, irony, self-mockery and literary allusions meet a dark sense of humour. From evolution and religion to death and the meaning of life, Rudo approaches the largest philosophical questions with disarming lightness.
Teórie osobnosti
Dominik Želinský
Poetry · 2021 · 144 pages
Sociologist, critic and poet Dominik Želinský observes the people, institutions and habits of contemporary life with wit and perspective. Beneath the apparent detachment of his poems lies a close engagement with personal, professional and corporate relationships. Accessible and quietly incisive, the collection reveals how the networks around us shape the ways we think and live.
Vandala
Jana Beňová
Fiction · 2021 · 200 pages
These interconnected short stories explore forms of vandalism within relationships. Characters and themes return in new situations and through different narrators, creating patterns that resemble a mandala—yet generate tension rather than harmony. The title also echoes a street vendor’s call on Brooklyn Bridge: ice water, one dollar.
Mŕtva kaviareň
Martin Melicherčík
Poetry · 2021
Martin Melicherčík’s poetry debut brings the language of contemporary city life into conversation with popular culture, past and present. Playful and funny on the surface, the poems reveal a more reflective melancholy beneath. Like the café of the title, the collection is both lively and haunted by unnoticed solitude in the crowd.
Úchopový inštinkt
Richard L. Kramár
Poetry · 2021 · 84 pages
Richard L. Kramár maps identity in motion through precise, experimental language. Inner change takes physical form as the poems explore the relationship between selfhood, transformation and the body. Their carefully judged distance allows an intimate engagement with emotion without sentimentality.
Mínus telo
Michal Baláž
Poetry · 2021 · 98 pages
Michal Baláž turns an observant, witty eye on both inner experience and the world around us. His poems can be read as brief commentaries that entertain while sharpening our sensitivity to everyday social realities. A varied collection distinguished by humour, precision and a readiness to notice what others overlook.
Čistá biela (je mýtus)
Liana Rosinová
Non-fiction · 2020 · 308 pages
Is white architecture ever neutral? Liana Rosinová examines the cultural and ethical meanings concealed behind the apparently pure surfaces of modernism. Moving across disciplines and focusing on figures including Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos, she questions the symbolism of whiteness and argues for a more humane understanding of architecture.
Flanérova košeľa (8 a pol bratislavských ulíc)
Jana Beňová
Non-fiction · 2020 · 344 pages
For two years, Jana Beňová wandered the streets of Bratislava, observing their rhythms and talking to the people who live, work and pass through them. Her account follows places beyond the usual tourist routes, tracing their histories, controversies and everyday encounters. A portrait of a city seen from its edges and at walking pace.
Synchroironizovaný muž
Martina Sľúková
Fiction · 2020 · 80 pages
Thirty-six micro-stories explore chance moments, helplessness, erotic desire and unexpected turns of experience. Martina Sľúková assembles text and collage into a sequence of attractions that can shift abruptly from comic exaggeration to unsettling recognition. A compact, inventive encounter between visual and literary storytelling.
Kurič v letnom kine
Augustín Dobrovodský
Poetry · 2017 · 184 pages
This volume brings together two poetry collections by Augustín Dobrovodský, whose work draws on surrealism and the poetry of absurdity. Published to mark what would have been his seventieth birthday, it also includes reflections by fellow writers and artists, extracts from a 1975 samizdat songbook and period photographs.
Pogodowitz
Maroš Krajňak
Fiction · 2017 · 132 pages
Maroš Krajňak moves beyond Central Europe while confronting the margins of Slovakia with a wider world. Different periods overlap, and reality slips into the surreal and the virtual. This unsettling work explores guilt, manipulation and the danger of people who believe they can defeat evil in the name of a higher good.
Chaconna
Tomáš Hučko
Fiction · 2018 · 186 pages
A relationship comes apart in a narrative interwoven with fragments of reflection, poetry and short fiction. In his debut novella, Tomáš Hučko tests the limits of authenticity and asks how the stories we tell reshape our understanding of ourselves. Even the wish to be honest may conceal another fiction.
Lepšia verzia seba
Ivona Pekárková
Poetry · 2019 · 80 pages
Ivona Pekárková subjects everyday life to a witty, unsparing examination. Relationships, popular culture, consumerism and literary criticism enter poems that dismantle familiar situations with subtle humour. Beneath the language of self-improvement, the collection uncovers the stories through which we understand both ourselves and the world.
Veľká budúcnosť
Erik Šimšík
Fiction · 2019 · 200 pages
In the post-apocalyptic Central Europe of 2040, writer Vlado lives in the futuristic city of Centropolis. Climate change has elevated his social standing, yet he cannot understand the society it has created. Erik Šimšík’s cyberpunk novella moves between melancholy, cynicism and absurdity, offering an unsettling vision of human life after upheaval.
Čabajka a iné údeniny
Erik Šimšík
Poetry · 2017 · 125 pages
Erik Šimšík’s third book moves through three independent sections, from poems on the page to visual poetry and sensory collage. It culminates in nonCAPS, a collaboration with English poet Marcus Slease. Across these changing forms, language becomes material to reshape, combine and play with.
Spevník
Boris Ondreička
Poetry · 2018 · 672 pages
Boris Ondreička’s expansive Slovak literary debut gathers sixty-one chants across almost seven hundred pages. Developed over many years, with some roots reaching back to the early 1990s, the texts reflect on truth, happiness, freedom, love, art and poetry itself. A large-scale retrospective work by an artist, curator and singer.
For enquiries about translation rights and international cooperation, please contact František Malík at vydavatelstvo@brak.sk.