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https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1n_Uli%C4%8Diansky

Partial translation:

..As a writer, he debuted in 1974 with the radio fairy tale Aťa and her
friends , and two years later he wrote the play Tik Tak , which he later
adapted into a theatrical form. His literary debut was the book of fairy
tales Adelka Zvončeková . In his literary work, he is primarily
dedicated to children's readers, viewers and listeners. He is the author
of several fairy tale titles: Snow White Islands , We Have Emu ,
Squirrel Veronica , Dragon Flame , Mr. Firstborn , Wonderful Tales of
the Seven Seas , Magic Boy , Three Riddles (about puppet theater) , Cat
on Roller Skates , Four Elves and a Fairy , The Little Princess ,  The
Illiterate Illiterate , Leonardo, the Street Cat , The Little Fairy, Max
and Lea , Mr. Idea Saves the World . Several of his children's books
have been translated into Czech, Italian, French, Russian, German,
Lithuanian, and English. [ 5 ]

He also wrote puppet plays for children: Čáry Máry Fuk (1978), Janko
Pipora (1983), Bohatier Klemienok (1987), Peter Kľúčik (1996), Prípad
hrášok (2004), Čarodejníkov učen (2006), Panáčik (2012) and others. The
original musical Squirrels , [ 6 ] which he also directed, was performed
92 times at the Andrej Bagar Theatre in Nitra from 2007 to 2013. In
November 2008, the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava staged his
fairy tale play Kocúr na rollerskórych , directed by the author . In
2010 , the State Theatre in Košice premiered the fairy tale Štýria
skřiatková a víla, written and directed by him. In the same year, he
directed Benjamin Britten's opera The Chimney Sweep at the Slovak
National Theatre Opera . He wrote and directed the comedy The Chimney
Sweep about the Urban Tower in Košice for the Košice Puppet Theatre in
2013. [ 5 ]

He also made his mark on Slovak dramatic work as an author of plays for
adults, primarily with the play Allergy , [ 7 ] which was staged by the
Slovak National Theatre in 1994 , and was the basis for the television
film Allergy in 1997. [ 8 ] In 1998 , the television film Obrus ​​s
monogramom was staged based on his script . [ 9 ] For radio, he wrote
and directed the mini-dramas Keys [ 10 ] as part of the Waiting for the
Tender One cycle and Arena Verona as part of the Aftermaths of the
Tender One cycle. The original radio musical Applause [ 11 ] was created
in honor of the Centennial of Slovak Theatre. He also dramatized several
titles of world and Slovak classics for radio and theatre, such as Peter
Pan and The Little Mermaid . [ 5 ]

His fairy tales were also used as the basis for the television series
Snow Fairy Tales , We Have Emu , and Heroes of the Seven Seas . He was
the author of the concept and creative producer of the children's
entertainment and educational program Trpaslíci , [ 12 ] broadcast on
RTVS .

For many years he was the president of the Slovak section of IBBY . For
many years he actively participated in the radio play festival "The
Magic Nut" in Piešťany on behalf of RTVS . Since 2021 he has been a
member of the RTVS Council . [ 13 ]

An essay he wrote for IBBY in 2006 (you HAVE to read this; it includes a
true story):

The destiny of books is written in the stars

Grown-ups often ask what will happen to books when children stop reading
them. Perhaps this is one answer:

"We'll load them all onto huge space ships and send them to the stars!"

Wow...!

Books really are like stars in a night sky. There are so many, they
cannot be counted and they are often so far from us that we do not dare
to reach out for them. But just imagine how dark it would be if one day
all the books, those comets in our cerebral universe should go out and
cease to give forth that boundless energy of human knowledge and
imagination…

Oh, dear!

You say children cannot understand such science fiction?! Very well
then, I shall come back down to earth and allow myself to remember the
books of my own childhood. This is anyway what came to my mind when I
was gazing at the Plough, the constellation we Slovaks call "the Big
Cart", because my most precious books came to me on a cart... That is,
not to me first, but to my mother. It was during the war.

She was standing at the roadside one day, when a cart came rattling
along - a hay wagon piled high with books and drawn by a team of horses.
The driver told my mother that he was taking the books from the town
library to a safe place, to prevent them from being destroyed.

At that time my mother was still a little girl eager to read and at the
sight of that sea of books her eyes lit up like stars. Until then she
had only seen carts full of hay, straw or perhaps manure. For her a cart
full of books was like something out of a fairytale. She plucked up the
courage to ask:

"Please, couldn't you give me at least one book from that big pile?"

The man smiled, nodded, jumped down from the cart and unfastened one
side with the words:

"You can take home as many as are left lying in the road!"

The books tumbled noisily out of the cart onto the dusty road and in a
short while that strange wagon had disappeared round a bend. My mother
gathered them up, her heart beating loud with excitement. When she had
dusted them down, she found that among them, quite by chance, there was
a complete edition of the tales of Hans Christian Andersen. In the five
volumes of various colours there was not a single illustration, but in a
miraculous way those books lit up the nights my mother so dreaded. This
was because during that war she had lost her own mother. When she read
those tales in the evening, each of them gave her a little ray of hope
and with a quiet picture in her heart, painted with half-closed
eye-lashes, she could calmly fall asleep, at least for a while...

The years passed and these books found their way to me. I always carry
them with me along the dusty roads of my life. What dust am I talking
about, you ask?

Ah!

Maybe I was thinking of the star dust which settles on our eyes when we
sit reading in a chair on a dark night. If, that is, we are reading a
book. After all, we can read all kinds of things. A human face, the
lines on a palm, and the stars...

The stars are books in a night sky and they light up the darkness.

Whenever I doubt whether it is worth writing another book, I gaze up at
the sky and tell myself that the universe really is boundless and that
there must still be room for my little star.



Written by Jan Uliciansky, translated by Heather Trebatická