Terezia Kontova was born in Slovakia in 1985. Kontova earned her master‘s degree at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava in 2012. She is a writer and painter. She has received many international awards, including the 2018 San Francisco Book Festival, Honorable Mention, for her Young Adult debut book The Uphill Hike, self-published by Amazon.com in 2018. Recently, Kontova was awarded the 2019 San Francisco Book Festival, General Fiction, Honorable Mention, for The Heartbeat, self-published by Amazon.com in 2019.