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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.
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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
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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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.