The literary career of Andrej Hieng began when his short stories and novellas started appearing in the mid 1950s; his work immediately provoked a lively interest and appreciation among both the critics and public because of his highly innovative prose style. At the end of the 1960s he turned to dramatic writing, especially for the mass media. His radio and television plays were a formative influence on the development of Slovene work in these media, and some of these plays were translated and performed in other European languages. Although he was a professional stage director and his plays were being published, Hieng did not limit himself to his work in the theater; after 1966 he became increasingly successful as a novelist. He has never been a social realist or humanist (in the sense of the leading literary trend of the 1940s and 1950s), and he cannot be called a...