OLTVÁNYI OTTÓ

Oltványi Ottó was born in 1971 in Novi Sad. He grew up in Subotica, where he was active in the local comics and literary scene. He studied English language and literature at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, where he has lived since 1991.

His first novel was published under a pseudonym by the Novi Sad newspaper Dnevnik, two years after his manuscript was accepted when he was sixteen. Although he had published two stories in the magazine of the Subotica Science Fiction Society “Meteor” in the second half of the 1980s, his first story, “The Dying Butterfly,” appeared in an official publication in April 1993. Since the early 1990s, he has published around fifty short stories in magazines ranging from Politikin Zabavnik to the Niš-based Gradina, as well as in anthologies ranging from Tamni vilajet to Istinite laži, some of which were collected in the collection Stories of Mystery and Magic (2017).

He has written for Vreme, Pressing, Neon, and Hooper. Together with illustrator Ivan Pejkić, he worked on one season of the original series “Monster Agency” for the children’s magazine Tik-Tak.

He has translated Lucius Shepard’s The Golden Blood, David Shaw’s Rain Like a Bullet, Matthew Collin’s This Is Serbia Calling, George Pelecanos’s King Suckerman, as well as Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, You Don’t Love Me Yet, and The Fortress of Solitude.

He has published the novels Crne cipele (Black Shoes, 2005), Kičma noći (The Spine of the Night, 2010), Iver (Splinter, 2015), and Polje meduza (The Field of Jellyfish, 2023). In 2019, he published the children’s detective novel Kako sam postao detektiv (How I Became a Detective).

He is the recipient of the “Lazar Komarčić” Award (2004), the “Ljubomir Damjanović” Award (2004), and the “Stanisław Lem” Award for speculative fiction in literature (2022).