He studied acting and art history, he has worked with Czech Television and Czech Radio on drama programmes for children, and the cycle Příběhy malého Lucifera (Tales of Young Lucifer) was published as part of the prose poems Manévry (Manoeuvres, Q, 1992). The jury explained its decision thus: “In the context of contemporary Czech verse, Jaroslav Pížl’s poetry comes across as somewhat extravagant – primarily because the most important thing for this author is not the semantic statement but the sound quality of the text, a sort of ‘music of words’ or ‘oral literature’. Pížl, who also frequently interprets his poems in a distinctive way and ‘puts the finishing touches’ to them with his voice and gestures, brings his audience back to the acoustic sources of speech, to an awareness that words were originally sounds.”

This was followed by Exteriéry (Exteriors, Bonaventura, 1994), the short poems in rhythmical prose Svět zvířat (The World of Animals, Torst, 1996) and the prose poems Vodní hry (Water Games, Petrov, 1998).

Rodinný život (Family Life, Petrov, 2000) is described by Dora Kaprálová in a review for MFDnes thus: “If the reader accepts the principle of the game offered by the author, the rhythm of the shuffling waltz melodies, he discovers that the book is essentially a eulogistic topography of the family. In his texts Pížl counterbalances the pleasure of this absurd slowness, at times approaching a kind of hallucinogenic trance of body and soul, with wild images of parental fatigue. And it must be said that he does so with a provocative nobility and irony.”

After five collections of poetry, Pížl produced the novel Sběratelé knih (Book Collectors, Petrov, 2004). This traditional book within a book references detective stories and sci-fi. As Lukáš Foldyna writes in Host, “The title also refers to the situation of the writer in general: from a certain point of view every author of a literary work is a collector of stimuli from other texts, a compiler (sometimes a brilliant smelter of influences, sometimes a mere looter). And the plot of Pížl’s book becomes a metaphor for this situation.”

The author’s latest book is a sequel to Sběratelé knih entitled Adrenalin (Adrenaline, Druhé město, 2010). Once again it is part horror story, part detective story and part thriller, but related in a sophisticated and action-packed way.