The Franz Kafka Society has announced that the winner of this year’s award is Milan Kundera. The 91 year-old writer responded to the announcement from Paris by phone, saying he was particularly honored to receive the Kafka Prize. The Kafka Prize has a long list of prestigious previous winners, including a brief run where it […]
Daniela Hodrová began writing A Kingdom of Souls in 1977 but the book, like the rest of her work, didn’t appear until after the fall of the communist regime in 1991. In 2012, Hodrová was awarded the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize, which had previously been awarded to the likes of Philip Roth, Haruki Murakami and […]
The Prague-based Franz Kafka Society has awarded this year’s Franz Kafka Prize to Israeli writer Amos Oz. Oz is coming to the award ceremony that will take place in October and I hope, like 2011 winner John Banville did, will come to Kafka Society HQ to speak more informally, read from his work and take […]
Prague’s online literary journal B O D Y has four short and fantastic pieces by Daniil Kharms translated by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky. They are described as poems but like much of Kharms’ work go beyond typical literary categories, but to see how a writer begins in mid-spit, moves to émigré biography and ends […]
The Franz Kafka society announced today that this year’s Franz Kafka Prize goes to writer and literary theorist Daniela Hodrová. There were a few years where the Kafka Prize was seen as a golden globe-like preview of the Nobel Prize for literature after Elfriede Jelinek and Harold Pinter won both in successive years. My guess […]
The day after the ceremony in which he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in Prague, Irish novelist John Banville came to the Kafka Society’s basement haunts and, against the backdrop of Kafka’s old library, spoke about his work, murderers (and looking like a murderer), Nabokov, and a number of other things. Below is the […]
You cannot make this stuff up. It requires multiple Kafka organizations, Kazakh embassy press services and lazy, incompetent journalists to create the right effect. Less than a month ago I wrote about the shadowy European “Franz Kafka” Circle Prague, which seems to award its Franz Kafka Medal just before the internationally renowned Franz Kafka Society […]
Irish novelist John Banville was presented the 11th annual Franz Kafka Prize on Tuesday by the Franz Kafka Society, with various Czech dignitaries in attendance. The ceremony took place in Prague’s Old Town Hall, and the internationally celebrated writer, critic and author of a book on Prague spoke about how he imagined the proceedings would […]
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