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 […]
“The place where the executions took place was right under the ramparts of the castle of Matthew III Csák of Trenčín. The condemned were hanged, beheaded, caned, broken on a wheel, quartered, and witches were burned – he was learning the art of torture.” – from “Signs“, which is an excerpt from Dušan Mitana’s final, posthumously […]
“The collection’s cast of characters includes, among others, a child-like dwarf creature who needs to be kept away from water and serves as a litmus paper in the human world, an ex-stripper ceaselessly emitting cigar smoke in emulation of her act of long ago and an old woman whose devoted tending of the apricot tree […]
“There was a time, long, long ago now, when Michal used to be scared of him. Once he was startled awake in the middle of a hot summer’s night, to find his little brother sitting on his bed, motionless, a dark silhouette. Although he couldn’t see his face, he knew that the little one was […]
With the anniversary of the events of 1989 upon us there will be a series of events revolving around contemporary Slovak writing taking place in the UK. Presented under the banner ‘Raising the Velvet Curtain:A journey through contemporary SLOVAK arts’ a series of writers and publications will be presented by translator Julia Sherwood as well […]
“I would have forgotten this story if, about a year later, I hadn’t read a newspaper report about a lorry apprehended by the customs police in Vyšné Nemecké, at the border crossing between Slovakia and Ukraine. It is a place where customs officers frequently come across lorries that carry cheap, Chinese-made copies of branded clothes […]
Fifty years ago, Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, crushing the liberalization of the Prague Spring. What people today know about the consequences of this usually comes from images on the streets of Prague and from the lives of internationally-known Czech intellectuals like Václav Havel and Milan Kundera. This second excerpt from journalist and translator Agneša […]
For the second time an excerpt a novel of one of the pre-eminent Slovak writers, Pavel Vilikovský, has appeared in B O D Y’s Saturday European Fiction, with this excerpt from Fleeting Snow, published by Istros Books in a translation by Julia and Peter Sherwood. This will be the first work published by Vilikovský in […]
Slovak writer Pavol Rankov’s most recent novel Miesta, čo nie sú na mape (Places That Are Not on the Map) was published at the end of 2017. An excerpt from the novel appeared in the latest Saturday European Fiction in B O D Y in a translation by Magdalena Mullek and now writer and translator […]
“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 […]
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