The Birdcage Archives

Thursday 24 May 2018

The Franz Kafka Prize, 2018 Winner


Hello Gentle Reader

The Franz Kafka Prize is a relatively new literary award; established in two-thousand and one, where it was first awarded to the recently departed Philip Roth. Over the past seventeen years, the award has gathered attention for its unique list of laureates, which blends both world renowned authors and still yet unknown. Previous winners include: Elfriede Jelinek, Harold Pinter, Amos Oz, Peter Handke, Arnošt Lustig, and last year’s Margaret Atwood.

The Franz Kafka Prize has outlined the following as the criteria that the judges use to evaluate the winning authors:

The basic criterion is the quality and exclusivity of the artwork, its humanistic character and contribution to cultural, national, language and religious tolerance, its existential, timeless character, its generally human validity and its ability to hand over a testimony about our times.”

[Retrieved from the Franz Kafka Society Website: Franz Kafka Society]

This year’s winner of the Franz Kafka Prize is the Czech poet and collage artist: Ivan Wernisch. Wernisch has been publishing poetry since the early sixties. His poetry is known for being diverse and chameleon like in nature, moving from playful, to tragic, absurd and dreamlike, to imagistic haikus and lengthy monologues, to metaphysical meditations. He has been called a postmodern poet of the first degree, where his poetry is painted with skepticism, and a certain fascination with both high cultural pursuits, and the populated world of low culture. Over the past five decades, Ivan Wernisch, has been one of most critically acclaimed contemporary Czech poets. The sheer diversity of his themes, forms, and style, has earned Ivan Wernisch this award.

Congratulations Ivan Wernisch.

Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read

M. Mary

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