My translations from Czech include novels by Magdaléna Platzová, Jáchym Topol, Bianca Bellová, Petra Hůlová, J. R. Pick, Tomáš Zmeškal, Josef Jedlička, Heda Margolius Kovály, Patrik Ouředník, and Miloslava Holubová. I have also Englished stories, plays, subtitles, young adult and children’s books, song lyrics, reportages, essays, poems, philosophy, art history, and an opera.
Playing Wolf, my translation of the Zuzana Říhová novel Cestou špendlíků nebo jehel, is forthcoming from Catapult in September: “A couple deep in the woods of a failing marriage find themselves the unwitting victims of a kidnapping plot after they move to a mysterious village in this distinctly poetic and disturbingly elegant horror novel for fans of Midsommar and The Witch.” Preorder your copy here.
Life After Kafka, my translation of Magdaléna Platzová’s novel Život po Kafkovi, is out now from Bellevue Literary Press. Agniezska Holland says, “Magdaléna Platzová’s novel offers a new key to Kafka’s world: we look at it through the tender and sorrowful gaze of the people whose fate had been marked by him personally. An utterly touching book!” Order it here. In March, our novel was shortlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize 2025.
The Book of Prague: A City in Short Fiction, including my translation of “Žižkovite,” by Patrik Banga, is out now from Comma Press. Order it here.
My translation of A Sensitive Person, by Jáchym Topol (“A brutally funny, carnivalesque novel about love, death, and survival, from the Czech Republic’s greatest living author”) was published by Margellos World Republic of Letters at Yale University Press on January 3, 2023, in the US and January 10 in the UK. In March of last year, it was shortlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize 2024.
My translation of The Lake, by Bianca Bellová, was named winner of the EBRD Literature Prize 2023: “utterly propulsive, immersive and unique, [it] deserves to become a European classic, to be read by many generations to come” (chair of judges Toby Lichtig). Buy your copy here.
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Currently, I am seeking publishers for five novels: Biography of a Black-and-White Lamb, by Tomáš Zmeškal; Dust Collectors (excerpts here and here) and Deathmaiden (winner of the European Union Prize for Literature; excerpt here), by Lucie Faulerová; and Cracks (about a levitating sphere whose inexplicable appearance rocks society on Earth; excerpt here) and Bodies (about mothers, daughers, and their bodies), by Klára Vlasáková. For samples, synopses, and author bios, write alexz (dot) nyc (at) gmail (dot) com.
I also maintain a list of Czech literature translated into English, from 1987 to the present, at bit.ly/czechlitinenglish. (For works prior to 1987, see George J. Kovtun’s Czech and Slovak Literature in English. A Bibliography. Second Edition [searchable PDF].) Since 2018, I have been a member of the Cedilla & Co. literary translators’ collective.