Born 27 June 1941 in Palúdzka. Since 1958 he studied to be a film director at FAMU in Prague changing after two years to the study of English and Slovak which he graduated in at Comenius University in Bratislava in 1965. He worked as an editor with the publishing house Tatran, and from 1976 to 1995 as a deputy chief editor of the literary monthly Romboid. He worked in the Slovak editorial department of Readers' Digest. At present he is a freelancer. He lives in Bratislava.
Vilikovský is one of the most expressive voices of contemporary Slovak literature on the domestic as well as on the international literary scene. He belongs to a strong generation of writers, which emerged in the 1960s, and fundamentally changed the face of Slovak fiction. His works are considered modern classics and they have received many awards. He is the only writer to have won the most prestigious Slovak award for fiction, the Anasoft Litera Prize, twice. Vilikovský’s most popular titles such as Vlastný životopis zla (The Autobiography of Evil, 2009), Pes na ceste (Dog on a Road, 2010) and Letmý sneh (Fleeting Snow, 2014) all share a poignant irony, typical Central European melancholy, and most importantly, brilliant, clear, and dangerously precise language. This is corroborated by another famous figure of Slovak literature, Tomáš Janovic, who, speaking about Vilikovský’s writing, has said that the more simply a deep thought is expressed, the deeper it is.
