The Franz Kafka Prize 2016 - Claudio Magris
The Italian writer Claudio Magris, the author of the famous book Danube, translated into 25 languages, was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in the Old Town Hall of Prague on Thursday, 27 October 2016. He became the sixteenth laureate of this international literary prize awarded by the Franz Kafka Society in cooperation with the Capital City of Prague.
Claudio Magris (1939 Terst) is a writer and a literary scholar, the author of extensive prosaic as well as scientific work (see the attachment with C. Magris’ CV). As a literary scholar and Germanist, he worked i.a. in Germany, Turin and his native Terst. Czech translations of his works include his fiction, e.g. the novel Alla cieca (Blindly; in Czech as Poslepu in 2011), essay publications on cultural and literary history – Mikrokosmi (Microcosms, in Czech as Mikrokosmy in 2000), Der habsburgische Mythos in der modernen österreichischen Literatur (The Habsburg Myth in Modern Austrian literature; in Czech as Habsburský mýtus v moderní rakouské literatuře in 2002), Lontano da dove: Joseph Roth e la tradizione ebraico-orientale (Far from Where: Joseph Roth and the Oriental Hebrew Tradition; in Czech as Daleko odkud: Joseph Roth a východožidovská tradice in 2010). His most famous work, which has been translated into twenty-five languages, is a combination of a novel, essay, diary and autobiography called Danubio (Danube; first published in Czech as Dunaj. Životopis řeky by the publishing house Odeon in the translation of Kateřina Vinšová and Bohumír Klípa1992).Claudio Magris is a laureate of many Italian as well as foreign awards.
The Franz Kafka Prize has been awarded by the Franz Kafka Society since 2001. Its laureates so far include the writers Philip Roth, Ivan Klíma, Péter Nádas, Elfriede Jelinek, Harold Pinter, Haruki Murakami, Yves Bonnefoy, Arnošt Lustig, Peter Handke, Václav Havel, John Banville, Daniela Hodrová, Amos Oz, Yan Lianke and Eduardo Mendoza.
In 2016, the jury included André Derval, Marianne Gruber, prof. Oldřich Král, Petr Matoušek, Lorenzo Silva, Jiří Stránský, prof. Jiří Stromšík and prof. Hans Dieter Zimmermann. At its meeting, the jury chose between eleven remarkable figures of contemporary world literature.
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