Berlin, Jan 17 (CTK) – Czech writer, scriptwriter and playwright Jaroslav Rudis, 45, will receive the prestigious German Preis der Literaturhauser (award of literature houses) this year, which carries 15,000 euros, the organisers told CTK on Wednesday.
Rudis will take over the prize at the book fair in Leipzig, Germany, on March 15.
The organisers appreciated Rudis’s miscellaneous work and his ability to use various literary forms.
“In his texts, Jaroslav Rudis depicts society with irony and a subtle sense of people’s everyday worries with the aid of peculiar characters who often fall victims to tragicomic events,” the organisers said on Wednesday.
Rudis said that in his opinion, this prize was the most important one he had ever received.
“I am pleased that I have readers in Germany and Austria. I think that Czech literature and Czech culture in general needs to be exported,” Rudis, living alternately in Germany and the Czech Republic, told CTK.
He said the award of the literature houses that operate not only in Germany, but also in Austria and Switzerland to support literature, and organise readings, belonged to his colleagues and aides as well.
He said he considered the return to “a certain bilinguality” important to him. This was normal in the Czech Lands 100 years ago, but it has slightly disappeared since then, he said.
“I am terribly glad that I am moving in both languages, that I feel at home in them,” Rudis said on his relation to the Czech and German languages.
Rudis, who is a quite popular author in Germany, won fame with his first novel The Sky under Berlin (Nebe pod Berlinem) in 2002 for which he won the Jiri Orten Award. He also wrote the novels Grandhotel (2006) and The End of Punk in Helsinki (Konec punku v Helsinkach, 2010), for instance.
Besides, he founded the Kafka Band music group.
His collaboration with draughtsman Jaromir 99 led to the publication of three closely connected graphic novels, White Brook (Bily potok, 2003), Central Station (Hlavni nadrazi, 2004) and Golden Hills (Zlate hory, 2005). They are set at an out-of-the way railway station in Bily Potok in the mountains near the Polish border in the 1980s.
The trilogy was adapted into the film Alois Nebel, combining animation with acting and released in 2011, which won the European Film Award, dubbed “European Oscar,” in the category of animated films a year later.
Rudis, who will tour Germany with his readings in the spring, was also presented with the Magnesia Litera main Czech literature award. In Germany, he received the annual German Usedom Prize for Literature awarded by the book festival in the German Usedom island in 2014.
