With Prague Book World coming up a series of events are being held in conjunction with the English-language publication of J.R. Pick’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a tragicomic novel of a thirteen-year-old Czech boy sent to the Terezín ghetto. On Thursday, May 10th at 6:30 pm, Karolinum Press and The Bubny […]
“The writer bought a literary magazine, leafed through it, and was gratified: he hadn’t submitted anything and none of his work had been published. A few weeks later the annual nominations for the national literary prize were announced: to his relief, he wasn’t nominated…” So begins Balla’s short story “Paper Planes“, translated from the Slovak […]
Way back in 2013 when the world wasn’t utterly collapsing I had the foresight to publish an excerpt from Balla’s novella In the Name Of the Father, translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood. Now the book has been published by Jantar Publishing and translator Charles Sabatos has written about it in the […]
Two Slovak writers whose work is just coming out in English translation will be appearing this Wednesday, May 17 at Waterstones Piccadilly in London. Balla and Ivana Dobrakovová, together with translator Julia Sherwood will participate in conversation with Rosie Goldsmith. Dobrakovová and Balla’s work are both included in the excellent Slovak fiction anthology Into the […]
Sometimes in the world of literature in translation when it rains it pours. So it is that on May 12th it will be pouring a fantastic new selection of books, including a Czech modernist in English for the first time, a surreal Czech novel written during Czechoslovakia’s normalization after the Soviet occupation and a Russian […]
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 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 […]
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