Zsófia Balla


Zsófia Balla is a Romanian-born Hungarian poet and essayist. She is considered to be one of the most prominent female poets in Hungary.

Biography

Balla was born in the Romanian city of Cluj to ethnic Hungarian parents. Her father was a writer and her mother a German teacher. She studied music at the Cluj Academy of Music, graduating in 1972. After divorcing her first husband, she married the poet Csaba Báthori in 1997.
After publishing her first poems in the journal Igaz Szó in 1965, her first collection of poetry A dolgok emlékezete was published in Bucharest in 1968. From 1972, she worked in the Hungarian department of the Cluj radio station as music editor until the station was closed in 1985. Thereafter she worked as a journalist for the national Romanian newspaper Elore and as literary editor for two weekly magazines. In 1990, she became a member of the Hungarian Writers Association and in 1992 she joined the editorial board of the Hungarian literary magazine Jelenkor. Since 1993, she has been living in Budapest, Hungary.

Awards

Considered to be one of the most prominent women poets in Hungary, she has received many awards including the Romanian Writers Association Prize and the Hungarian Attila József Prize in 1996. In 2008, she became a Laureate of the Hungarian Republic.

Selected works

Balla has published the following collections of poetry: