A collection of short stories in which language becomes a site of observation, memory and unease, and where prose and poetry meet in a darker, sensually dense version of everyday life.

Prose, Short stories

With the collection Cécile and the Others, Petr Borkovec once again enters the world of prose without abandoning his fundamental terrain: linguistic intensity, observational precision and sensory density. The stories transform seemingly ordinary situations into powerfully visual, existentially charged images. A dead crab on a shore, a half- bleached pigeon, sea waves, ghosts and village legends all appear here on the same level of meaning, without hierarchy, and all viewed in motion. Borkovec thematizes the very act of observation itself, introspectively, and with an acknowledgement of the vulnerability of the individual gaze and of mystification. The movement between prose and poetry, so characteristic of his work, is pushed even further here—towards language as an autonomous space of experience. The result is a book that compels the reader to struggle through the text and to accept its unease and the darker aesthetic that is integral to it.

Petr Borkovec (1970) is a poet, novelist and translator. He has worked as an editor for Lidové Noviny Publishers, Lidové noviny, Literární noviny, and the review Souvislosti. From 2005 to 2023 he was the dramaturge and host of the Prague literary café Fra. He writes regular pieces for the radio station Vltava, the magazines A2 and Qartál, and the online literary journal iLiteratura. He teaches at the Department of Creative Writing of the Academy of Creative Communication. He is a regular contributor to the review Listy. Borkovec made his debut in 1990 with the poetry collection Silent Table Settings (Pražská imaginace). His most recent books to date are the prose volume Cécile and the Others (Fra) and the children’s book Dictations (with Andrea Tachezy; běžíliška). The Baobab publishing house is preparing a poetry collection entitled Little Boats for publication in 2026. Borkovec has translated Russian poets including Vladislav Khodasevich, Vladimir Nabokov, Yevgeny Rein, Joseph Brodsky, and Yuri Odarchenko. Together with the linguist Matyáš Havrda, he has worked on translations of the ancient tragedians: they have jointly translated Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Euripides’ The Bacchae, and Euripides’ Medea. In 2027, a new translation of Sophocles’ Antigone will premiere at the National Theatre. Borkovec has published books in Great Britain, Italy, France, Slovenia and Romania, though mainly in Germany and Austria (where almost all of his poetry and prose has been published in German).