This week our writers bring news from the Czech Republic, where Michal Ajvaz has been awarded the Czech state Prize for literature, and Sweden, where a major publishing house has announced a competition to discover the next international crime fiction star. Read on to find out more!
Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Czech Republic
On 30 October the Czech state Prize for literature 2020 was awarded to poet and fiction writer Michal Ajvaz, whose work has been compared to Borges and Neil Gaiman. Three of his novels are available in English: the imaginary travelogue Golden Age (trans. Andrew Oakland), The Other City (trans. Gerald Turner), a guidebook to an invisible, “other” Prague, populated by ghosts, eccentrics, talking animals, and impossible statues invisible to tourists, and Empty Streets (trans. Andrew Oakland), the story about a missing girl and a search for meaning.
At the end of September, Milan Kundera was reported to have joyfully accepted the Czech Republic’s Franz Kafka Prize. Following on the announcement in late July that Kundera and his wife decided to donate their archive and books to the Moravian Library in Brno, this marked another step in the slow but steady warming of relations between the Czech-born writer and his motherland—or at least, the city of his birth, Brno.
Over the past few years, the Czech Literary Centre has forged strong links with a couple of key partners, and as a result the Lakes International Comic Art Festival (LICAF) chose Czech comics as the focus of its 2020 festival in October in Kendal, UK. Although live participation of Czech graphic artists had to be postponed to 2021 because of the pandemic, a few events were held online and some trailers showcasing forthcoming English translations of Czech comic books were launched. One features the artist Václav Mašek and his summer 2019 residency in Kendal, while Jan Novák’s Zátopek, a graphic novel about the life of the legendary Czech marathon runner, previewed in this video trailer, has since been published by SelfMadeHero.
In 2021, the Czech Literature Centre’s priority will be poetry, and its plans for digital events include a series on Czech poetry for an international audience, online readings, and discussions as well as residencies for writers. Meanwhile, Paris Notebook, a bilingual poetry collection by Tereza Riedlbauchová, one of the authors featured in the summer issue of Modern Poetry in Translation (a video from the online launch can be seen here), has recently been published by Visible Spectrum, in an English translation by Stephan Delbos. For those who have been tempted to break into translating Czech literature but don’t know where to start, the great news is that Bristol Translates has expanded the range of languages on offer and this year’s summer workshop will include Czech, with Asymptote’s past contributor Gerald Turner, Václav Havel’s court translator, as tutor and places are still available (details here). And budding Czech translators under the age of forty have until the end of March to take part in the 6th International Competition for Young Translators (details here).
Jantar Publishing has commissioned Czech artist Míla Fürstová, known for designing the cover art for the Coldplay album Ghost Stories, to create lavish new illustrations for its renewed edition of Kytice (A Bouquet of Folk Legends), a collection of Romantic horror ballads in Susan Reynolds’ inspired translation. Kateřina Tučková’s Gerta, dealing with a painful chapter of Czech history—the post-war expulsion of Germans from Brno (read an interview with the author here) —is due from AmazonCrossing in February in Véronique Firkusny’s translation. And although New Direction’s Barbara Epler has complained to Veronica Esposito in a recent interview for World Literature Today that “one of our best books in years, All My Cats, by Bohumil Hrabal, barely sold at all,” she presses on undeterred. The Gentle Barbarian, Bohumil Hrabal’s homage to Vladimír Boudník, one of the greatest Czech artists of the 1950s and 1960s, will be published in March, translated by Paul Wilson.
Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden
Swedish publishing house Saga Egmont and their Danish parent company Lindhardt og Ringhof announced that they will introduce a new literary contest to discover Sweden’s next international crime fiction star. “We’re all streaming American TV series and listening to music from the whole world. Now it’s time for books. Our writers should have the same opportunities to be published globally and simultaneously,” the publishing house stated in a press release. The first prize includes a publishing contract and the winner will be published in print in Sweden and Denmark, and digitally in translations to ten other languages for markets around the world, including Latin America and the US. “It’s about time that Sweden got a global crime fiction contest,” the press release says. “We simply want an international audience to access a really good Swedish suspense novel.” Saga Egmont is a publishing house with a digital focus that publishes writers including Henning Mankell and Jonas Hassen Khemiri.
The digital development is not only apparent in publishing houses’ planning for the future, but also in book sales. The Christmas period is the most significant time for book sales in Sweden and now that sales numbers have been released for the end of the year, some interesting conclusions can be drawn from the effects of the pandemic. Coronavirus restrictions and recommendations to avoid crowded spaces led to both earlier Christmas shopping and a lower level of in-store sales in cities and large shopping malls. Online book sales, on the other hand, increased notably, with sale increases of fifty percent compared with the previous year. Overall, online book sales increased in 2020 in Sweden, with new customers turning to online shopping and people spending more time at home. During the fall, some of the big online book stores, like Bokus and Adlibris, developed their logistics for delivering books and in spite of the large increase in sales, book stores were better prepared for Christmas sales in 2020 than the previous year.
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