Michal Ajvaz is a Czech

Czech people

Czechs, or Czech people are a western Slavic people of Central Europe, living predominantly in the Czech Republic. Small populations of Czechs also live in Slovakia, Austria, the United States, the United Kingdom, Chile, Argentina, Canada, Germany, Russia and other countries...

 novelist, poet and translator, an exponent of the literary style known as magic realism

Magic realism

Magic realism or magical realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world. The story explains these magical elements as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the "real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of...

.

Biography

Born to the family of Russian exile, Ajvaz studied Czech studies

Czech studies

Czech studies is the field of humanities that researches, documents and disseminates Czech language and literature in both its historic and present-day forms...

 and esthetics at Charles University in Prague. Currently he works as a researcher at Prague's Center for Theoretical Studies and, in addition to fiction, has published an essay on Derrida and a book-length meditation on Borges. His novel Prázdné ulice was awarded the Jaroslav Seifert

Jaroslav Seifert

Jaroslav Seifert was a Nobel Prize winning Czech writer, poet and journalist.Born in Žižkov, a suburb of Prague in what was then part of Austria-Hungary, his first collection of poems was published in 1921...

 Prize for literary achievement (2005), the most prestigious literary award in the Czech Republic.

External links

• Jonathan Bolton's essay on "Reading Michal Ajvaz" in CONTEXT.
• List of works by Michal Ajvaz in the Czech National Library
• Dalkey Archive Press site for The Other City
• Translation of prose piece from Padesát pět měst (in The Cafe Irreal
  The Cafe Irreal
  The Cafe Irreal is an Internet journal dedicated to the publication and propagation of irrealist literature. Online since 1998, it has published a number of notable authors whose work sometimes fits into this non-realist genre, such as Charles Simic, Ignacio Padilla, and Pavel Řezníček...
  
  )