All prizes Czechia
Czechia · Since 2002 · For books in Czech
The Czech book awards' prose category (Litera za prózu), for original Czech prose of the previous year. The jury names a shortlist of nominees (three until 2009, six from 2010 to 2022, three since 2023), and the prize is named for its spring ceremony year (Magnesia Litera 2010 went to a book published in 2009).
Magnesia Litera has been awarded every spring since 2002 by the Litera association, with the mineral water brand Magnesia as its title sponsor. It sets out to promote good books of every kind, so it is given in several categories covering the whole of Czech book production, from prose and poetry to non-fiction, translation and children's books. Each category has its own jury, delegated by the relevant professional bodies; the prose jury was first appointed by the Czech PEN Centre and the Writers' Community. The overall Book of the Year and the Discovery of the Year are chosen by a wide panel of about three hundred people from the book world. In 2010 the prose category was widened from three to six nominations to give Czech prose a better chance at the Book of the Year.
Magnesia Litera 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Secret Life of Institutions”
Ladislav Šerý · 67 when first published
Novel · 195 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:One working day in the life of a minor clerk at a small museum, where the paranoia and autocracy of the managers collide with the fear of their staff and the romantic dreams of eternal idealists.
Magnesia Litera 2026 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Phases of One Woman”
Magdaléna Platzová · 53 when first published
Short stories · 166 pages
AI-generated summary:Nineteen stories trace stages in women's lives, setting out from a village funeral, a literary trip to Britain, a study rented from a French countess, Christmas on an island and a Christmas party in Lyon.
Magnesia Litera 2025 · Shortlist
Kristina Hamplová · 27 when first published
Novella · 146 pages · Speculative, Coming of age, Love
AI-generated summary:Four frantic episodes from the life of an ordinary girl, from a teenage manhunt in a forest in 2014 to a parched city in 2031, as a new aggression-inducing substance made from parrot meat spreads.
Magnesia Litera 2025 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Whitsun”
Miroslav Hlaučo · 57 when first published
Novel · 381 pages · Historical, Speculative, Love
AI-generated summary:In 1904 the people of the remote little town of Svatý Jiří still walk on water, break stone by whistling and talk to angels, when Odysseus, a native long thought dead, comes home.
Magnesia Litera 2024 · Shortlist
Alena Machoninová · 43 when first published
Novel · 262 pages · Historical, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A Czech scholar of Russian tries to reconstruct the life of Helena 'Hella' Frischerová, a Czech Jewish woman long thought executed in Stalin's Great Terror, who in fact spent ten years in the Gulag.
Magnesia Litera 2024 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Burnout”
Petr Šesták · 42 when first published
Novel · 129 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:A bicycle courier delivering food around the city, who pedals too much and thinks too much, wages his own street war against car drivers, addressing his motorist enemy directly as 'you'.
Magnesia Litera 2023 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Narrator”
Anna Bolavá · 41 when first published
Novel · 358 pages · Speculative, Family
AI-generated summary:Young Vítek Kříž and his brother Jáchym grow up in Běstviny, where legend says a giant worm lives under the compost heap in the castle garden and must be fed with joy, fear, guilt and sometimes something alive.
Magnesia Litera 2023 · Shortlist
Život po Kafkovi
Magdaléna Platzová · 50 when first published
Novel · 256 pages · Historical, Migration
AI-generated summary:A novelist sets out in 2010 to find traces in America of Felice Bauer, Kafka's former fiancée, who married, had two children, emigrated and kept the letters of the man who left her for forty years.
Magnesia Litera 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Good Ending”
Irena Dousková · 57 when first published
Short stories · 145 pages
AI-generated summary:Nine grotesque and melancholy stories, set between the Soviet invasion of 1968, Václav Havel's funeral and the Covid present, show history reflected in the hard, awkward everyday lives of ordinary people.
Magnesia Litera 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Amálie's Stillness”
Kateřina Rudčenková · 45 when first published
Novel · 157 pages · Autofiction, Love
AI-generated summary:Amálie, a forty-two-year-old magazine editor versed in every art and idea, who loves the mountains and Japan, is slowly missing her chance to become a mother and looks for answers in psychotherapy.
Magnesia Litera 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Lucky Beny”
Simona Bohatá · 56 when first published
Novel · 363 pages · Coming of age, Historical
AI-generated summary:In early-1980s Prague, young Beny leaves home to escape his violent father and finds refuge at an eccentric's scrapyard, where a strange makeshift family forms around him.
Magnesia Litera 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Don Quixote's Greatest Lesson”
Štěpán Kučera · 36 when first published
Novel · 220 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:The young soldier Miguel Cervantes, held captive by pirates in Algiers, and Sidi Hamet, a dervish driven mad by Arab travel writing who roams real and imagined lands with a lame camel and a foundling child.
Magnesia Litera 2022 · Shortlist
Cestou špendlíků nebo jehel
Zuzana Říhová · 40 when first published
Novel · 243 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Bohumil and Bohumila move from Prague with their mentally disabled son to a small village in the borderlands to save their marriage, and during a hot summer they try to fit in with the locals.
Magnesia Litera 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Death Girl”
Lucie Faulerová · 31 when first published
Novel · 205 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Máry, a young woman struck by family tragedy and by her own conscience, travels by train in search of the meaning of life and death, revisiting the home of three siblings whose mother inexplicably left them.
Magnesia Litera 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Stopover”
Matěj Hořava · 40 when first published
Short stories · 131 pages · Autofiction, Migration
AI-generated summary:A Czech narrator living on a housing estate in Tbilisi faces a new foreign land, a new incomprehensible language and new encounters, and escapes the city's grey chaos with trips to the Black Sea and the Caucasus.
Magnesia Litera 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“When Your Head Starts Spinning”
Ondřej Štindl · 54 when first published
Novel · 253 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:In January 2018, just after Miloš Zeman's re-election, Jan 'Johan' Souček, a burnt-out newspaper columnist, is pushed out of his job and makes a senseless decision after reading a mocking comment online.
Magnesia Litera 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“To Pick Up a Stick”
Petr Borkovec · 50 when first published
Short stories · 169 pages
AI-generated summary:Thirty-two short prose pieces, columns and reflections by a poet who says he has swapped dreaming for gawking record a world in motion, the stillness of things and the passing of personal experience.
Magnesia Litera 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Dustbin Novel”
Vladimír Merta · 74 when first published
Novel · 503 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:Hever, a partly autobiographical man of letters, wanders through a satirical caricature of Czech life before the 1989 revolution, just after it and today, among dissidents, longhairs, communist youth officials and secret police informers.
Magnesia Litera 2020 · Shortlist
David Zábranský · 42 when first published
Novel · 402 pages · Satire, Speculative, Politics
AI-generated summary:After a shocking discovery in a Shanghai shopping centre, Danish brand expert Robert Holm decides to change the world and, through social media, sets off a new migration of peoples.
Magnesia Litera 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Possibilities of a Love Novel”
Jan Němec · 38 when first published
Novel · 416 pages · Love, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A writer looks back on a great love affair and the six years of the relationship that followed, driven by an obsessive need to understand why it ended.
Magnesia Litera 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Around Jakub”
Michal Vrba · 43 when first published
Short stories · 175 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:Five stories, from the Thirty Years' War to the 1990s, gather around one place: the Jakub fishpond in the forests of central Bohemia, where ordinary people are caught in the wheels of history.
Magnesia Litera 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Gilgamesh Project”
Štěpán Kučera · 34 when first published
Novel · 159 pages · Speculative, Historical
AI-generated summary:Urshanabi, the ferryman from the ancient epic, is granted immortality in place of King Gilgamesh and sails the world's seas across the centuries into our own time and the near future.
Magnesia Litera 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Mined-Out Region”
Veronika Bendová · 45 when first published
Novella · 195 pages
AI-generated summary:Hugo and Irena, two colleagues and former partners, drive through the mined-out landscape of northern Bohemia looking for gloomy locations for an ambitious director's film.
Magnesia Litera 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Elvis from Záluží”
Jiří Kamen · 67 when first published
Short stories · 258 pages
AI-generated summary:Twenty-four short pieces catch turning points in individual lives and in society, love's awakenings and failures, and the mechanics of relationships as political orders come and go.
Magnesia Litera 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Hemingway's Bull”
Michal Šanda · 53 when first published
Short stories · 120 pages
AI-generated summary:Seventeen stories bring scarred matadors into an imaginary ring to face their own ageing, among anglers, fish and the outsiders who meet in shabby pubs.
Magnesia Litera 2019 · Shortlist
Petr Stančík · 50 when first published
Novel · 217 pages · Crime, Satire
AI-generated summary:Inspector Libor Lavabo takes on what looks like a simple case of twelve burnt female rhinoceroses, only to find it tangled up with Goethe's secret diary and two conspiratorial societies fighting for world power.
Magnesia Litera 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Hours of Lead”
Radka Denemarková · 50 when first published
Novel · 747 pages · Politics, Family
AI-generated summary:A Czech businessman with his wife and teenage daughter, a Russian diplomat, a French man of letters, a calligraphy student and a cook are among the Europeans who have come to China to put their lives in order.
Magnesia Litera 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“In the Wardrobe”
Tereza Semotamová · 35 when first published
Novel · 222 pages
AI-generated summary:After her partner's unexplained death abroad, a young woman returns to her home country with nowhere to live, takes a wardrobe her sister is throwing out, puts it in a courtyard and moves in.
Magnesia Litera 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“To the Bottom”
Anna Bolavá · 36 when first published
Novel · 284 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:With the first frosts at the end of November, the body of the doctor Marek Diviš's wife is found in the marshes at the edge of a small town, and speculation and gossip begin to spin.
Magnesia Litera 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“White Animals Are Very Often Deaf”
Ivana Myšková · 36 when first published
Short stories · 203 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories about people trapped in their lives like a white stag whose neck got stuck in an old tyre, slightly deaf and off balance, unable to love, resist or open up, caught in moments of crisis.
Magnesia Litera 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Dust Catchers”
Lucie Faulerová · 28 when first published
Novel · 220 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A young woman who wants nothing to do with children or motherhood is locked in a complicated relationship with her sister and avoids visiting their mother, who is serving a long prison sentence.
Magnesia Litera 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Deceased”
Ondřej Horák · 41 when first published
Novella · 130 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Štěpán, a young, bored and pampered poet who collects likes on social media, travels from the land of fjords through Auschwitz to Budapest in search of something to fill his empty life.
Magnesia Litera 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Best for Everyone”
Petra Soukupová · 35 when first published
Novel · 363 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:When his mother, a Prague stage actress, gets a TV role on the other side of the country, ten-year-old troublemaker Viktor is sent, against his will, to live with his grandmother in the countryside.
Magnesia Litera 2017 · Shortlist
Aleš Palán · 51 when first published
Novel · 262 pages · Historical, Politics, Crime
AI-generated summary:In January 1952 a communist official is found shot dead on a pile of brushwood in a forest near the Sázava river, and the regime turns her murder into a weapon against the farmers of the region.
Magnesia Litera 2017 · Shortlist
Jezero
Bianca Bellová · 46 when first published
Novella · 186 pages · Coming of age, Nature
AI-generated summary:In a fishing village at the end of the world, by a lake that is drying up, a boy named Nami who has nothing but a grandmother sets out to find the mother who vanished from his life.
Magnesia Litera 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“It's Never Been Better”
Ladislav Šerý · 58 when first published
Novel · 279 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:A group of ageing Prague drinking companions, IT workers, graphic designers and self-taught philosophers, talk in their pubs, fall in love as if they were young again and send infatuated text messages.
Magnesia Litera 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Everything Happens Only Twice”
Michal Přibáň · 50 when first published
Novel · 468 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:On the threshold of middle age, newly divorced and having lost his parents, the journalist Pavel Klimeš retreats into memories of childhood summers with friends at a mountain cabin in the Giant Mountains.
Magnesia Litera 2017 · Shortlist
Voliéry
Zuzana Brabcová · 57 when first published
Novel · 132 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:In diary-like notes from December 2012 to February 2015, a woman longs to escape her loneliness and feel close to someone, yet cannot overcome her fear of being hurt again by indifference.
Magnesia Litera 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Magpie on the Gallows”
Daniel Petr · 40 when first published
Novel · 263 pages · Coming of age, Family
AI-generated summary:A boy grows up with his alcoholic father in a crumbling house on the edge of a backwater in northern Bohemia, reading before other children start school yet kept in an almost medieval ignorance full of ghosts and demons.
Magnesia Litera 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Winding Sentences”
Daniela Hodrová · 69 when first published
Novel · 375 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:An autobiographical narrator calls up her friendships with the writer Bohumila Grögerová and the artist Adriena Šimotová, weaving memory, the last things of life and the making of a text into one spiralling story.
Magnesia Litera 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Martin Juhás, or Czechoslovakia”
David Zábranský · 38 when first published
Novel · 575 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:Martin Juhás, the son of a young Slovak labourer and a spoilt woman from southern Bohemia, is cursed from conception to be not a resister but a rebel, in a Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1948.
Magnesia Litera 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Roast Zebra”
Iva Pekárková · 52 when first published
Novel · 271 pages · Migration, Love
AI-generated summary:Four intertwined stories follow mixed couples of Czech women and African men, and the Africans who find a reality in the Czech Republic quite unlike the one they knew.
Magnesia Litera 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Sigmund's Nightmares”
Pavel Bušta · 24 when first published
Short stories · 202 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories about psychotics and outsiders on the edge of normality: a box of undelivered letters brings an artist together with a teenage Nazi, and four boys on holiday find a hanged man and let him join their gang.
Magnesia Litera 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Imago: You Dope!”
Hana Lundiaková · 36 when first published
Novel · 293 pages · Coming of age, Satire
AI-generated summary:Houžvička, a fragile and impractical single mother who grew up on the fringes of the underground, sets out into a world of elbowing for comfort, careers, money and life online.
Magnesia Litera 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Poet: A Novel about Ivan Blatný”
Martin Reiner · 50 when first published
Novel · 594 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:The life of the Brno poet Ivan Blatný: early literary fame in Czechoslovakia, flight to England in March 1948, erasure from Czech literary history, and decades spent in English psychiatric hospitals.
Magnesia Litera 2015 · Shortlist
Milena Slavická · 65 when first published
Novel · 212 pages · Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:In the early 1970s, fearing reprisals from the regime, the young photographer Hana flees to London through a sham marriage, leaving her small daughter with her own mother in Prague.
Magnesia Litera 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Preliminary Examinations”
Petr Pazdera Payne · 54 when first published
Short stories · 197 pages
AI-generated summary:Twenty-two short stories, each built in a different way, draw on biblical themes, art history and theology to catch the fateful drama of ordinary lives without relying on big plots.
Magnesia Litera 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Wind, Darkness, the Present”
Václav Kahuda · 49 when first published
Novel · 715 pages · Autofiction, Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:A narrator sets out to solve a family mystery from the 1940s, when the German secret police took his grandfather, a gifted engineer, to the Reich and tried to make him collaborate.
Magnesia Litera 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Lorenz, Betrayals”
Anna Zonová · 51 when first published
Novel · 209 pages · Politics, Satire
AI-generated summary:In a harsh forest, a partisan spurred on by his power-hungry wife helps get rid of a hesitant commander and rises to unlimited rule over an unnamed land as its new leader, Lorenz.
Magnesia Litera 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Just a Smudge Across the Sky”
Ivan Binar · 71 when first published
Novel · 212 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:After the war, a group of outcasts marked by the times is sent to a small border town emptied of its former inhabitants, where a new socialist town slowly grows out of their ragged community.
Magnesia Litera 2014 · Shortlist
Dějiny světla
Jan Němec · 32 when first published
Novel · 412 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Told to its hero in the second person, the life of the photographer František Drtikol unfolds from a silver-mining town in Bohemia through art-nouveau Munich to the bohemian Prague of the interwar republic.
Magnesia Litera 2014 · Shortlist
Jaroslav Rudiš · 41 when first published
Novella · 148 pages
AI-generated summary:Vandam, a frustrated roof painter from a big Prague housing estate, settles his scores with the city, the recent past and his family's demons in street fights.
Magnesia Litera 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Love on a Stranger's Grave”
Ludvík Němec · 56 when first published
Short stories · 250 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Five long stories, loosely tied together by one heroine and a shared motif, follow people seized by fateful and sometimes bizarre erotic desire.
Magnesia Litera 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“And Now Something from Life”
Anna Blažíčková · 79 when first published
Nonfiction · 453 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A writer and literary historian recalls her forty years of marriage to the literary scholar Přemysl Blažíček and her own life from the 1940s to the present.
Magnesia Litera 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Germans”
Jakuba Katalpa · 33 when first published
Novel · 416 pages · Historical, War, Family
AI-generated summary:After her father's sudden death in 1987, a young Prague woman sets out to find the German grandmother who sent the family parcels for decades and was never spoken of.
Magnesia Litera 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Fish Blood”
Jiří Hájíček · 45 when first published
Novel · 354 pages · Family, Nature
AI-generated summary:In 2008 Hana returns after fifteen years abroad to her half-flooded native village on the Vltava, emptied for the Temelín nuclear plant, to face her family and old friends.
Magnesia Litera 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Good Night, Sweet Dreams”
Jiří Kratochvil · 72 when first published
Novel · 294 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:On 30 April 1945 in Brno, as the Wehrmacht flees and fighting goes on in the outskirts, two men search the chaotic city for an American who has penicillin.
Magnesia Litera 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Europe Is Like a Thonet Chair, America Is a Right Angle”
Sylva Fischerová · 49 when first published
Novella · 78 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A Czech poet on a reading tour of the United States compares the two continents, while news of a friend's death arrives and a love affair comes to an end.
Magnesia Litera 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Circular Hunt”
Jiří Kratochvil · 71 when first published
Short stories · 272 pages
AI-generated summary:Thirteen stories that mix fragments of history with the present and episodes from famous lives with the wishes and dreams of ordinary people, behind ever-changing masks.
Magnesia Litera 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Tones”
Jiří Stránský · 80 when first published
Novella · 155 pages · Family, Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:A famous old composer and his granddaughter, a young pianist, work together on setting a novella to music, and his long life comes back to him.
Magnesia Litera 2012 · Shortlist
Josef Moník · 59 when first published
Novel · 209 pages · Historical, War, Love
AI-generated summary:František, son of a Czech father who sided with the Germans, survives service in the Wehrmacht and American captivity and returns to Karlovy Vary to find his school sweetheart married.
Magnesia Litera 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Luxembourg Garden”
Michal Ajvaz · 62 when first published
Novella · 172 pages · Speculative, Love
AI-generated summary:Paul, a philosophy teacher in Paris, opens by mistake the files of a dead professor and becomes absorbed in a story whose dialogues are written in an invented language.
Magnesia Litera 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Passage”
Sylva Fischerová · 48 when first published
Short stories · 145 pages
AI-generated summary:Short first-person stories in which everyday banality meets existential questions, as the narrator looks for the meaning of things in today's world.
Magnesia Litera 2011 · Shortlist
David Jan Novotný · 63 when first published
Novel · 381 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:During the great Prague flood of August 2002, ten Jewish men evacuated from their homes find shelter in a Jewish guesthouse and pass the time telling their stories.
Magnesia Litera 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Rules of Ridiculous Behaviour”
Emil Hakl · 52 when first published
Short stories · 133 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:In three stories a middle-aged narrator tries paragliding with two younger friends, says goodbye to his dying father and travels to the Danube Delta to scatter his ashes.
Magnesia Litera 2011 · Shortlist
Nebe nemá dno
Hana Andronikova · 43 when first published
Novel · 302 pages · Autofiction, Nature
AI-generated summary:After her father's death and a diagnosis of cancer, a woman travels to the Peruvian jungle and the Nevada desert, trying to come to terms with her own possible end.
Magnesia Litera 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Ask Dad”
Jan Balabán · 49 when first published
Novel · 183 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:After their father, a doctor, dies, his children try to understand his life and their own, and a charge that he did not treat all his patients alike still hangs over him.
Magnesia Litera 2011 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Guardians of the Civic Good”
Petra Hůlová · 31 when first published
Novel · 207 pages · Politics, Satire
AI-generated summary:A young woman devoted to the communist youth league sees the world before 1989 as the best possible one, and the changes after it as so wrong that they must be put right, by force if need be.
Magnesia Litera 2010 · Shortlist
Na krásné modré Dřevnici
Antonín Bajaja · 67 when first published
Novel · 426 pages · Coming of age, Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:Written as letters to his sister, a man remembers their childhood in Zlín just after the war, as the communists take power and the town becomes Gottwaldov.
Magnesia Litera 2010 · Shortlist
Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch
Kateřina Tučková · 29 when first published
Novel · 460 pages · Historical, War, Family
AI-generated summary:On the night of 30 May 1945, Gerta Schnirch, mother of a baby girl, is driven out of Brno towards Vienna with the city's other Germans.
Magnesia Litera 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“My Favourite Book”
Markéta Pilátová · 36 when first published
Novel · 272 pages · Crime, Speculative
AI-generated summary:In a South American city of drug gangs and armed slums, a tattooist tells his customers the story of the Snake Institute and its ruthless director.
Magnesia Litera 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Lucka, Maceška and Me”
Martin Reiner · 45 when first published
Novel · 173 pages
AI-generated summary:A young man becomes a father figure to a little girl who is not his own, while searching for his sexual identity and for the past of a famous exiled poet.
Magnesia Litera 2010 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“To Disappear”
Petra Soukupová · 27 when first published
Short stories · 340 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Three long stories about families and siblings, two of them told by children, in which each hero tries to come to terms with a family trauma that sets them apart.
Magnesia Litera 2009 · Shortlist
Cesta na jih
Michal Ajvaz · 59 when first published
Novel · 596 pages · Crime, Speculative
AI-generated summary:In a village on the south coast of Crete, the narrator meets a young man who tells him how a search for the killer of two brothers led him there from Prague.
Magnesia Litera 2009 · Shortlist
Milostný dopis klínovým písmem
Tomáš Zmeškal · 42 when first published
Novel · 315 pages · Love, Politics, Historical
AI-generated summary:A love story struck by the political persecution of the 1950s: a prisoner of the regime grows estranged from those closest to him, in a state that reaches into private bedrooms.
Magnesia Litera 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“With One Eye”
Eliška Vlasáková · 64 when first published
Novella · 124 pages · Autofiction, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Little Eliška, the illegitimate child of a woman who runs a small tailoring workshop in Kyjov, grows up during and after the war, with an ailing eye that needs an operation.
Magnesia Litera 2008 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“To the Sea”
Petra Soukupová · 25 when first published
Novel · 198 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:The members of two families founded by the same father, related on paper but far apart as people, find their lives crossing on a holiday trip to the sea.
Magnesia Litera 2007 · Shortlist
Jaroslav Rudiš · 34 when first published
Novel · 173 pages
AI-generated summary:Fleischman, a thirty-year-old loner who understands clouds and weather, works as a handyman at the hotel on top of Ještěd mountain and cannot leave the town of Liberec below.
Magnesia Litera 2007 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Actor”
Jiří Kratochvil · 66 when first published
Novel · 310 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Mikuláš Mazel, gifted with an absolute talent for acting, can imitate anyone and takes all kinds of strange acting jobs, until his gift starts to look like a curse.
Magnesia Litera 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Little Girl, Light a Fire”
Martin Šmaus · 40 when first published
Novel · 254 pages · Migration, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Andrej Dunka, a Roma boy from a settlement near the Soviet border in eastern Slovakia, moves with his family to Prague's Žižkov, where they send him out to steal.
Magnesia Litera 2006 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“We Take What There Is”
Věra Nosková · 58 when first published
Novel · 295 pages · Coming of age, Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:Pavla grows up in a small Czech town in the 1950s and 1960s, longing for love, freedom and Prague, and for the Slovak father she has never met.
Magnesia Litera 2005 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“As Punishment and as Reward”
Anna Zonová · 42 when first published
Novel · 257 pages · Historical, War, Family
AI-generated summary:Four people of different nationality, class and generation live through the twentieth century in the Sudeten borderland of northern Moravia, from the Second World War to the 1990s.
Magnesia Litera 2005 · Shortlist
Zatím dobrý
Jan Novák · 51 when first published
Novel · 451 pages · Historical, Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:A family saga through two world wars and two totalitarian regimes, ending in a western-like chase in which five young men with pistols try to fight their way past twenty thousand East German police to the West.
Magnesia Litera 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Comedy”
Daniela Hodrová · 57 when first published
Novel · 212 pages · Autofiction, Historical
AI-generated summary:A writer tells her own life and those of her family, weaving them into the stories of many others, living and dead, who meet in Prague's Olšany cemeteries.
Magnesia Litera 2004 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“5 Shelter Street”
Edgar Dutka · 62 when first published
Short stories · 224 pages · Autofiction, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:After their mother is arrested and sentenced in 1948, seven-year-old Ben and his sister are placed in a children's home at 5 Shelter Street.
Magnesia Litera 2003 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Heaven Under Berlin”
Jaroslav Rudiš · 30 when first published
Novel · 141 pages · Love, Migration
AI-generated summary:A thirty-year-old teacher runs away from Prague to Berlin, where he wants to start a band called U-Bahn and find his girlfriend Katrin.
Magnesia Litera 2003 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A View from the Bridge”
Karel Švestka · 76 when first published
Short stories · 248 pages
Magnesia Litera 2002 · Shortlist
Noční práce
Jáchym Topol · 39 when first published
Novel · 320 pages · Coming of age, Politics
AI-generated summary:When Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia, a father takes his two young sons from Prague to the village he comes from, to hide them until things calm down.
Magnesia Litera 2002 · Shortlist
Europeana
Patrik Ouředník · 44 when first published
Novel · 151 pages · Historical, Satire
AI-generated summary:A mosaic of invented episodes, documents, dates and paraphrases surveys the twentieth century, its turning points and its haste, in a deliberately naive voice.