He was considered an existentialist whose works often dealt with the wretched and desperate aspects of the human condition.

Speaking of his steel-town home city, he recalled William Faulkner (to whom he was compared),[1] saying: "If you write about a place, you not only love it, but find much to hate."

A founding member of the group Prirozeni (The Natural – founded 1980), Balabán helped proliferate the underground arts community and rehabilitate the urban landscape by organizing exhibitions in attics, hallways, in subways and on slag heaps in the suburbs of Ostrava.

One of Balabán's most important works, Možná že odcházíme (It May Be That We Go), is a collection of twenty stories in just a hundred pages.

In the week leading up to his death, he was at a month-long authors' festival held in both his home town of Ostrava and Brno.