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 […]
Milan Kundera, together with his wife Věra, have donated the author’s library and archive to the Moravian Library in Brno, Czech Republic. The library has announced that the transfer of books and other materials from the Kundera’s Paris apartment will take place later this fall. Besides numerous international editions of the author’s books, his articles […]
Milan Kundera’s first novel in 13 years, The Festival of Insignificance, will be published in Linda Asher’s English translation next month and the New Yorker has just published an excerpt, though it’s being promoted as a short story, “The Apologizer”. The novel was published in Italy in 2013 and then in France and Spain. Bulgarian […]
If you’re at the London Book Fair today you can attend a discussion this evening on the broader and still broadening scope of contemporary Czech writing with translators Julia Sherwood, Alex Zucker and hosted by editorial director of Words without Borders Susan Harris. Sherwood is the translator of B O D Y’s most recent Saturday […]
Albanian writer Ismail Kadare has been announced as the winner of this year’s Jerusalem Prize, which he will be awarded at the Jerusalem International Book Fair on Feb. 8. The prize is given to writers dealing with the theme of human freedom in society and was inaguarated in 1963 with Bertrand Russell the first winner. […]
Milan Kundera wasn’t the only Czech writer to leave Czechoslovakia for France in the 1970s. Living a shadowy existence in another country is the subject of Lubomír Martínek’s story “Refugee” translated by Charles Sabatos. “Because the harbor was such a favored refuge for people escaping from various regimes, a lot of former political prisoners lived […]
Apparently it isn’t only filmmakers who misunderstand Kafka. In the Times Literary Supplement Gabriel Josipovici writes an article covering a number of quite varied books about or related to Kafka titled “Why we don’t understand Kafka” that brings a demanding yet even-handed take on the ultimate resistance to interpretation that Kafka’s writing contains. In a […]
The two stories in BEF 2012 that stood out the most for me were Czech writer Jiří Kratochvil’s “I Loshad’” and “The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus” by Polish writer Janusz Rudnicki. The excellence of these two stories shouldn’t be all that surprising. For while these and other Dalkey anthologies try to give exposure to young […]
The Franz Kafka Society’s publication of the first Czech translation of the correspondence of Erika Mitterer with Rainer Maria Rilke alerted me to the existence of a fascinating sounding writer. She was still a teenager when she corresponded with the great poet, published her own poetry collection at 24 and went on to write a […]
Two Geniuses: Francis Bacon & Bohumil Hrabal is a recently opened exhibition at The Gate Gallery that presents an illuminating parallel between two masters of their respective mediums. Both developed unique styles that swam against the current of modern art and literature. “If Bohumil Hrabal had been a painter he would have painted like Francis […]
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