Witty conversations in a sauna staking everything on undiluted dialogue.

Literary fiction  |  English sample translation available

A group of sixteen friends regularly meet in a sauna for some sweaty guy time filled with chat. But their refuge is about to close for good. This witty novel about men’s woes is based on pure dialogue from speakers who are only referred to by their Indian nicknames. It was staged in Brno by Divadlo Feste as the play Čekání na konec světa (Waiting for the End of the World) before the literary version was created, and in February 2019 it will have its premiere in Germany. This essentially humorous novel doesn’t have a central character or a dominant narrator, and yet it knows all there is to know about men’s expulsion from paradise. The great male we in times when something significant is coming to an end is the unifying element of this prose work.

Jaroslav Rudiš (1972) is a writer of novels and screenplays as well as theatre and radio plays. His debut novel Nebe pod Berlínem (The Sky Under Berlin) was published in 2002. He has written four novels and two novellas in Czech, which have been published in many languages and have even been made into films. For the novel Winterbergova poslední cesta (Winterberg’s Last Journey, 2019), which he first wrote and published in German, he was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and awarded the Chamisso-Preis/Hellerau in 2020. In 2022 he also received the Karel Čapek Prize for this work. He collaborated with the artist Jaromír 99 on the cult graphic novel Alois Nebel. He is a member of the group Kafka Band. He lives in Czechia and Germany and writes in both Czech and German.