The Vegetarian by Han Kang has awarded the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. The novel was translated into English by Deborah Smith and published by Portobello Books. The author and translator are each awarded a prize of £25,000 as well as a trophy. If you haven’t read this novel yet you absolutely should. It’s amazing. […]
The 23rd Book Festival Budapest begins today with neighboring Slovakia as the guest of honor. Many authors who have appeared in B O D Y and Literalab will be present, including Uršula Kovalyk, Viťo Staviarsky, Pavel Vilikovský, Jana Juráňová and Slovak translator Julia Sherwood. The festival includes a First Novel festival comprising 16 European […]
“…then the day when I will have seen the world once again robust held fast like the two parts of a belt buckle the word Russia and the word happiness I will really be ready to die…” From Phrases: Six Films by Jean-Luc Godard, translated from the French by Stuart Kendall. The book, to […]
Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life by Josef Jedlička, written between 1954 and 1957, might seem, on the surface, like a novel an English-language reader has some experience of. After all, Kundera and Hrabal have written of the Stalinist 50s – (Hrabal-readers most recently being granted access to his short stories from the 50s […]
“I killed several individual enemies in hand-to-hand combat, so now my fellow townspeople avoid me, and when I walk down the street everyone crosses to the other side. I can just smell their fear. It reeks of loathing, of Hegel and Kant, of the universal sense of human life and of so-called human kindness; all […]
“Kitchen full of black aunties sighed, outraged with Grandma’s lack of respect for the written word and the bloody stamp in the corner of the page. Nobody questioned the war death. She was the only one who put her foot down.” From the short story “Tola” by poet and short story writer Mirka Szychowiak, translated […]
2015 Nobel Prize for literature winner Svetlana Alexievich gave her speech (available in a translation by Jamey Gambrell) a couple days ago in Stockholm and like her books it was a mix of her present reflections, witness testimonies as well as her diary entries stretching from 1980 to 1997. Her conclusions aren’t very cheerful, but […]
Lukáš Luk’s novel Honey Thieves will be out in Slovak shortly but B O D Y has already brought you a short excerpt from this story of two brothers who gather honey in the forests of the newly Christian Kingdom of Hungary. It was translated from the Slovak by Magdalena Mullek. Read more Saturday European […]
November at B O D Y has been full of contemporary Czech writing brought to you by guest editor Jan Zikmund. It’s impossible to mention everyone here but there’s been poetry by Jiří Kolář, Ivan Wernisch, Tereza Riedlbauchová, Pavel Šrut and Olga Pek among many others. There were short stories by Jan Balabán and Magdaléna […]
The first week of B O D Y’s month-long Czech issue was finished off with a powerful short story, “Cedar and Hammer”, by the award winning writer Jan Balabán, whose literary output is all the more impressive considering he died at the age of 49. There is next to nothing of Balabán’s work available in […]
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