Michal Ajvaz’s books have been published in twenty-four languages: Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, with the rights sold to Ethiopia and Greece.
The author received Jaroslav Seifert Prize (2005) for his novel Empty Streets / Prázdné ulice and his novel The Luxembourgh Gardens / Lucemburská zahrada was awarded with the main prize Magnesia Litera - Book of the Year (2012). In 2020 Michal Ajvaz received the State Prize for Literature for his outstanding body of work.
International achievements:
the English translation of the novel The Other City / Druhé město: Amazon.com Editor's Top 10 Science Fiction/Fantasy Book of 2009, selected as one of the best books of 2009 by Time Out New York, selected as one of the best books of 2009 by Locus Magazine;
the English translation of the novel The Golden Age / Zlatý věk: voted first on Amazon.com Editor’s Top 10 Science Fiction/Fantasy Book of 2010, nominated for the Best Translated Book Awards 2011 (Three Percent, USA), honorable mention at Eurocon 2011 (Californian competition focused on English translations of science fiction and fantasy)
the French edition of Druhé město / L'Autre Ville (Mirobole, March 2015) awarded Prix Utopiales Européen 2015, and shortlisted for Prix Mythologica and Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire 2016
The author's works are presented in numerous anthologies worldwide, for example Best European Fiction 2011 (Dalkey Archive Press, USA), The Weird. Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (ed. Ann a Jeff VanderMeer, Corvus, London 2011; Tor Books, New York 2012) and The Bestiary. A Modern Bestiary of Untrue Tales (ed. Ann VanderMeer, Centipede Press, Lakewood 2015).
More on Michal Ajvaz in English:
Jonathan Bolton: Reading Michal Ajvaz (Context, No. 17)
Bio:
Michal Ajvaz was born in 1949 in Prague, his father was a Crimean Karaim and his mother was an Austrian Czech. He published eight works of fiction and also an essay on Jacques Derrida, a book about Edmund Husserl’s philosophy, as well as a book-length meditation on Jorge Luis Borges called The Dreams of Grammars, the Glow of Letters, and a philosophical study, Jungle of Light: Meditations on Seeing. He also wrote a couple of books together with Ivan M. Havel, e.g. Rooms at the Sea / Pokoje u moře. His latest work is The Cosmos as a Self-Creating / Kosmos jako sebeutváření.
