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Michal Ajvaz Czech Republic    PWF 2010, 2000

Heir to Borges—novelist, essayist, poet—Michal Ajvaz was born in 1949 in Prague, and studied Czech and aesthetics at Charles University. Unlike Borges—he has worked as a janitor, night watchman, and pump attendant, as well as an editor at the literary weekly Literární noviny.

“The beginning is something more terrifying than chaos. Chaos is always an accessory to order and belongs to our world—whereas the beginning is the quiet, feebleminded guffaw of a mad god, from which the Word will be articulated. ”

Michal Ajvaz repopulates Prague—with ghosts, eccentrics, even god—in novels serving as guidebooks to a vanished world—while continuing his research at Prague's Center for Theoretical Studies.

His novels include: Murder in the Hotel Intercontinental, Return of the Old Komodo Dragon, The Other City, Turquoise Eagle,  The Golden Age, The Mystery of the Book, Empty Streets—which received the Jaroslav Seifert Prize—and Journey to the South. For philosophy read—Jungle of Light: Meditations on Seeing.

Michal Ajvaz lives in Prague.