Prague, Oct 22 (CTK) – Spanish novelist Eduardo Mendoza Garriga was presented with the Franz Kafka Prize, which the Franz Kafka Society annually awards for authors’ life work and which carries a reward of $10,000, at Prague’s Old Town Hall Thursday.
Choosing Mendoza, 72, from ten candidates, the jury appreciated his narrative skills, human approach to the depicted events and sharp sense of humour.
“The international jury chose the name of this satirical author…in the second round of the vote,” Franz Kafka Society director Marketa Malisova said.
Mendoza said fiction literature is a game and that he approaches it accordingly.
Mendoza is the author of successful detective novels, master of humour and parody, but also a serious political commentator and opponent of Catalan separatism.
He has presented his work at a literary event in Prague’s Cervantes Institute.
Mendoza is the 15th winner of the Franz Kafka Prize, which is the first international literary prize awarded in the Czech Republic, launched in 2001.
Its previous winners include Philip Roth, Ivan Klima, Harold Pinter, Haruki Murakami,Peter Handke, Vaclav Havel and Elfriede Jelinek.
The prize is named after Franz Kafka (1883-1924), a world-known Prague German-language writer of Jewish origin.
