Background
Balla was born in the Romanian city of Cluj to ethnic Hungarian parents. Her father was a writer and her mother a German teacher.
Balla was born in the Romanian city of Cluj to ethnic Hungarian parents. Her father was a writer and her mother a German teacher.
She studied music (violin) at the Cluj Academy of Music, graduating in 1972.
She is considered to be one of the most prominent female poets in Hungary. After publishing her first poems in the journal Igaz Szó in 1965, her first collection of poetry A dolgok emlékezete (Memories of Things) was published in Bucharest in 1968. From 1972, she worked in the Hungarian department of the Cluj radio station as music editor until the station was closed in 1985.
Thereafter she worked as a journalist for the national Romanian newspaper Elore and as literary editor for two weekly magazines.
Since 1993, she has been living in Budapest, Hungary.
In 1990, she became a member of the Hungarian Writers Association and in 1992 she joined the editorial board of the Hungarian literary magazine Jelenkor.