Slovak writer Pavel Vilikovský died Monday at 78. He was one of Slovakia’s most prominent contemporary writers and his profile in English was getting a lift with the recent translation of his novel Fleeting Snow. Previously, his Ever Green Is …: Collected Prose, translated by Charles Sabatos, was his only available work in English from 2002.
I first met Vilikovský in 2011 in Prague and it was the brilliantly-titled story “All I Know about Central Europeanism (with a bit of friendly help from Olomouc and Camus)” that got him talking about what I assumed was a bit of magical realist invention of a writer-judged beauty contest in which he, Milan Kundera and Josef Škvorecký were the judges. But no, plain old realism.
You can read the interview here
We published Vilikovský in B O D Y twice.
Read an excerpt from his still to be published in English Autobiography of Evil translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood
Read an excerpt from Fleeting Snow translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood for Istros Books
Photo by Pavel Kastl
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