Lukáš Cabala spends his days in Trenčín, a small city in western Slovakia, working with pre-owned books. He manages Čierne na Bielom (Black on White), the online secondhand bookstore he founded with his parents in 2011.
But when the shop closes, another world opens. Cabala, 39, an award-winning Slovak author shortlisted for the 2025 European Union Prize for Literature, often writes late into the night. In this way, he lives two interconnected lives: one as a bookseller tending to literary memory, the other as a writer building new, dreamlike worlds from the quiet hours after work. “For me, it’s not so demanding,” Cabala says. “My bookstore work is calm, it is mostly relaxing. I can think about writing while working.”
“And I love meeting people,” he adds, “I have many book readings and events in different cities, and there are many impressions to draw from.”
That daily immersion in secondhand books has shaped how Cabala thinks about literature and time. The work places him in constant contact with what readers continue to seek out and with what slowly disappears from circulation.
Writing by intuition
Book covers of Lukáš Cabala’s Satori in Trenčín, Jar v Jekaterinburgu and Spomenieš si na Trenčín?.
Cabala’s fiction unfolds through a small but connected body of work. His debut novella, Satori in Trenčín, is constructed as a palindrome, designed to be read both forward and backward. Set in a speculative version of a future Trenčín, it takes place in a world that closely resembles the real one while remaining slightly dislocated. The book was shortlisted for the Anasoft Litera Award and introduced Vincent, a character who would reappear in Cabala’s later work.
Vincent returns in Spring in Yekaterinburg (Jar v Jekaterinburgu), published in 2021, where the setting shifts to a Siberian research station. Tasked with introducing ordinary people to science, Vincent works deep underground in a space defined by isolation and routine. As he begins a new book of his own, the people around him gradually enter the narrative, including local scientists studying permafrost, a guide named Yelena and a fellow countrywoman stuck on the road and unable to return home.
Cabala’s work is often described as magic or poetic realism, though he resists the idea of the surreal as a calculated effect. “Definitely more intuitive,” he says. “I write the story and patiently wait for the right moment, and it always appears.”
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A view from circulation
Despite growing international recognition, Cabala’s rootedness in Trenčín remains central to his work. He sees no tension between the local and the continental. “I love being European, I love being international,” he says. “It’s deeply inspiring. My stories are sometimes local, but I have always been open and curious about the world and other cultures. There are no borders in my head, and there never were.”
This openness extends to collaboration. His novel, Spomenieš si na Trenčín? (Will You Remember Trenčín?), was developed in close dialogue with paintings by Juraj Toman. “I had his paintings in my head, and I wanted the story to cooperate with and complement his painterly style,” Cabala says.
Running a secondhand bookstore has also given Cabala a long view of literary survival. Sudden revivals, he says, are rare. “It practically doesn’t happen that a book suddenly comes back, with the exception of movie adaptations or the author’s death, but even then, it usually doesn’t last long.”
“The most popular books in our bookshop remain the same,” he says, naming Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, one of the 19th century English novelists whose work remains central to the literary canon, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist and scholar whose fiction blends medieval history and philosophy with popular narrative, and novels by Agatha Christie, the British crime writer whose detective stories remain among the most widely read in the world.
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Lukáš Cabala recommends
Boat Number Five by Monika Kompaníková, Argentine-French author Julio Cortázar, and The Overstory by Richard Powers. (Source; Wikimedia Commons and amazon.in)
Asked to recommend a book that captures something essential about Slovakia for foreign readers, Cabala points to Boat Number Five by Monika Kompaníková. “It’s a very popular book in Slovakia, and its storyline is truly original.”
Among the writers who have influenced him most, Cabala names Julio Cortázar, the Argentine-French author best known for his formally inventive short stories and for the novel Hopscotch, which helped shape experimental fiction in the 20th century.
On his nightstand is The Overstory by the America novelist Richard Powers, which follows nine Americans whose unique experiences with trees draws them together to address the destruction of the wilderness.
If he could spend a single day inside the world of another novel, Cabala would choose The Beach (1966) by the British author Alex Garland, in which a backpacker finds an idyllic and isolated beach untouched by tourism.
Book covers of Lukáš Cabala’s Satori in Trenčín, Jar v Jekaterinburgu and Spomenieš si na Trenčín?. 
Boat Number Five by Monika Kompaníková, Argentine-French author Julio Cortázar, and The Overstory by Richard Powers. (Source; Wikimedia Commons and amazon.in)