Radoslav Rochallyi

Biography

His first book, “Panoptikum: Haikai no renga”, appeared in 2004 and was modelled on Japanese haiku. The author was twenty-four.

Rochallyi was born on 1 May 1980 in Bardejov, then in Czechoslovakia, into a family with Lemko and Hungarian roots. He has said in interviews that he began reading before school; the first book was “Black Ships” by Maciej Słomczyński, and at about eight he came across the poems of Mikhail Lermontov. He began writing poetry at ten and was publishing in magazines from the age of sixteen. Later he said that as a child he was drawn to logic, patterns and formal systems.

His education was varied. He completed a management programme at the London International Graduate School, according to some data in 2012–2014. At the Pratt Institute in New York he received a certificate in fine arts, and he studied philosophy and mathematics, linear algebra in particular. He is a member of Mensa. In 2001 he lived in Attleborough, England, where he wrote texts for his mathematical poetry, and in 2009 he walked the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela by the Camino Primitivo. He now lives in Malta and the Czech Republic.

From the mid-2010s he developed forms in which mathematics sets the rule. Around 2012 came “golden ratio poetry”: the number of words or syllables in each line repeats the digits of φ, 1.618034, usually in the pattern 1/6/1/8/(0)/3/3. It drew wide attention on 12 January 2015, after the collection “Golden Divine” (Brno, 2015). Sarah Glaz, a mathematician at the University of Connecticut, observed that he stopped the expansion at the sixth decimal place and rounded the last 3 up to 4. The critic Andrea Schmidt called the book a prototype of formal fundamentalism in poetry.

His other books of these years include “Blood” (2015), “Torwalden” (2016), and “Mechanics of Everyday Life” and “Arété” (both 2018, published by the Slovak Writers’ Association in Bratislava). The prose book “A Letter for a Son” (2017) won him second and third places in 2018 in the readers’ competition of the Slovak Writers’ Association. In the philosophical text “Mythra Invictus” (2019), a character named Caut searches for the meaning of existence in dialogue with Mythra. The author has said that the epic of Gilgamesh influenced him more than Mithraism did. In the essay “ESSE” (2020) he examines free will and determinism and describes morality as an adaptive trait of a social being.

The next step was “equation poetry”. The collection “DNA: Canvases of Poetry” (2019) uses equations as a means of expression; “PUNCH” (2020) appeared only in English, and so did “# mathaeata” (2021). Rochallyi has explained that the aim is not to preserve the meaning of an equation but to carry over its form and symmetry: otherwise the result would be a set of precisely placed words with no overall meaning. A reviewer in Rain Taxi called “PUNCH” one of the most important works of experimental poetry of the decade. The Slovak “Rovnicová poézia” (“Equation Poetry”) appeared in Bratislava in 2022. From 2022–2023 he has also worked on “vector poetry”, in which words or phrases are replaced by vectors. His poetic equations have been printed in journals and anthologies of American universities, Stanford among them.

Alongside this he paints and makes collages, and every work contains equations, operators or vectors. In 2020 he was included in the catalogue “101 Contemporary Artists and more”, and in 2023 he was a finalist at the Nanjing International Biennial, organised by the Nanjing University of the Arts. In 2024 his solo exhibition “Post Factual” was held in Břeclav, and he then received a residency in Slovakia, where he tried to translate poetic equations into painting. He has taken part in the Beep Painting Biennial in Swansea, in exhibitions in Rome, Berlin, Zagreb and Brno, and in 2025 in the miniature art biennial in Bitola. His work is announced for the Bridges exhibition in Galway in 2026. He has also curated the independent platform Space Byi, devoted to mathematical and conceptual art.

In 2023 he won second place in the Percy Bysshe Shelley Remembered poetry contest, he has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize, and in 2024 the Broadkill Review put him forward for Best of the Net. His essay “Deterministic Poetry” appeared in Denver Quarterly in 2025. In it he calls the poet both architect and saboteur: one who writes the law and chooses where to break it.