Evelyn Balan's father was an engineer from East Prussia, and her mother was from Austria. She grew up and was educated in Berlin, gaining a BA and MA, studying English, French, German, Spanish, Romanian and Comparative Linguistics. During vacations Balan did stints of obligatory war service (on the land and in factories). One such in 1942 was as an interpreter in Siemens, where she met Dr Pierre Tchaikovsky from Belgium, a white Russian aristocrat born in Bessarabia in 1896. He had refused to work for the Germans and had been taken to Berlin as a forced labourer in 1940. They were married in 1946, and Tchaikovsky found work with the British occupation authorities. Their son Peter was born the following year, and they migrated to Australia in 1950. Both Balan and Tchaikovsky worked as English teachers on board ship and in administration in the Bonegilla migrant camp. Balan was the first female migrant teacher in an Adelaide high school, teaching at Norwood High School in 1953 and at Brighton High School from 1955 to her retirement in 1983.
At Brighton High School Balan rose to the position of Special Senior Mistress in charge of languages. She was active in the development of modern language teaching methods and the study of civilization. This led to her writing four foreign language readers and two study handbooks of civilization. She was a member of a number of professional committees and was for a time President of the Modern Language Teachers Association in South Australia. She was elected as a Member of the Australian College of Education. In summer holidays Balan travelled regularly and widely to Europe, Japan and the Pacific, and wrote Wo Noch Nicht Jeder War-Australien and The Tourist's Creature Comforts in Europe with her son Peter.
From the 1980s Balan concentrated on creative writing, and in the late 1990s she used desk-top publishing to produce small print-runs of books for her family and friends. She has been a member of the Society of Women Writers, the SA Writers' Centre, the Multicultural Writers Association of Australia and local writers' groups. In 1990 Balan's work was read on the Peace Committee Programme on 5UV and she has read at the Writers' Centre and on radio stations 5UV, 5EBI-FM and Triple M FM. She is a committed pacifist, a (non-aggressive) feminist and a compulsive reader, concentrating on contemporary Australian writers and especially on Aboriginal writers.
