Prose

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1966 as the son of a Congolese intellectual and a Czech mother. He never knew his father. In the eighties, he went to London where he studied English language and literature at King’s College. And he became a writer. He received the Josef Škvorecký Prize (2009) and the European Union Prize for Literature (2011) for his novel Milostný dopis klínovým písmem. In 2006, he decided to find his father (or at least obtain some information about him). Zmeškal’s third book is not just a coverage, a diary, an autobiographical text about a search for part of the family but also an accessible instructional text about Africa, its history, culture, its present and about why we do not know (and do not want to know) anything about the black continent. Finally, it is also a report on the author himself.