Post-revolutionary Czech literature eagerly tackles various crises and highlights traumas. But can contemporary Czech prose and poetry really think dangerously and courageously? And is literary criticism succeeding in this? Do we need dangerous literature and courageous criticism? Literary critics Hana Blažková, Martin Lukáš and Jan Němec will attempt to answer these questions in a discussion about the Literary Criticism Prize. Moderated by Blanka Činátlová.

In collaboration with the Literary Criticism Prize.

Hana Blažková studied Polish Studies and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. As part of her doctoral studies at the Institute of Czech Literature and Comparative Literature at Charles University, she focuses primarily on political and socially contextual literary theories, forms of literary feminism, the book market, and contemporary Czech and Polish literature. She works in the Department for Research into Literary Culture at the Institute for Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences. She is the author of the study Literature Without Commitments? The Myth of a New Beginning in Political Reading in the 1990s (Literatura bez úvazků? Mýtus nového začátku v politickém čtení devadesátých let, 2022).

Martin Lukáš studied Czech language and literature, English language and literature, philosophy, and literary theory at the Faculty of Arts, Palacký University Olomouc.  Since 2017, he has been working at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where he focuses on 20th-century Czech literature, especially the war years, and contemporary literature. He has worked on the editorial boards of Aluze and the literary journal Bohemia Olomucensia, is an editor of the journal Texty, and is a regular contributor to A2. He has contributed to the collective publications Literary Chronicle of the First Republic, Events, Works, Contexts (Literární kronika první republiky, Události, díla, souvislosti, 2018) and History of Czech Literature in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, (Dějiny české literatury v Protektorátu Čechy a Morava, 2022). He edited an anthology of Vladimír Vokolek's poetry Whatever I Write, (Cokoli píšu, 2023).

Jan Němec is a Czech writer, journalist, and publicist. He is the author of a biographical novel about the life of Czech modernist photographer and artist František Drtikol, A History of Light (2013), for which he received the European Union Prize for Literature. He also wrote the auto-fiction novel Možnosti milostného románu (Ways of Writing About Love, 2019), which was nominated for the Magnesia Litera Award, or Liliputin: Povídky z války (Liliputin, Stories from the War, 2022). Together with Petr Vizina, he compiled a book of interviews on spirituality titled Znamení neznámého (Signs of the unknown, 2021). Since 2022 he has been editor-in-chief of the HOST literary magazine.

Blanka Činátlová is a literary historian and publicist. She specialises in Central European literature, pop culture, literary anthropology, and the didactics of literature. She published the scholarly monographs Příběh těla (The story of the body, 2009) and Odradky: Věc a věcnost v literatuře (Odradeks: The thing and thingness in literature, 2015). She teaches at Charles University, and since 2010 she has been the literary editor of the magazine A2.