Gejza Demeter grew up with his grandfather in Dlhé nad Cirochou, Slovakia, where he completed primary school with excellent grades. Then he went to grammar school in Bohemia, where his parents lived. He started studying medicine, but after three and a half years he dropped out, got married, settled in Neratovice, and started working. He worked in various professions. Among other things, he worked as a journalist for the weekly Spolana, spent several years with the police (then known as Public Security), and then worked as a labourer. He continued his journalistic career after 1991 as a correspondent for the Romani magazine Romano ľil / Romani Paper, which started coming out in Slovakia. At that time, he also became a member of the Association of Romani Writers based in Prague and contributed to its magazine Romano Gendalos / Romani Mirror. He was also a reporter for the daily newspaper Expres. He travelled around Europe and wrote reports. From 1991, he occasionally worked as a lecturer in Romani conversation classes at the Romani Studies Seminar at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. He wrote in both Romani and Czech.
In 1992, the Romani Writers’ Association released his first book of prose, a collection of three ghost stories entitled “O mule maškar amende” / “The Dead Among Us” in Romani. He then published several other short stories in Romani with translations into Czech in magazines and two short stories in the anthology Čalo voďi / The Nourished Soul (The Museum of Romani Culture 2007). In 2013, the Triáda publishing house published his book of Romani fairy tales, Ráj na zemi / Paradise on Earth. The short story “Le Čukčuskeri bari bibacht” / “Čukča’s Great Misfortune”, published originally in 2007 in the Roma-studies journal Romano džaniben, was included in the anthology Samet blues (Velvet Blues, Kher, 2021).
Photo: Zbyněk Andrš's private archive
