This subtle, impressionistic novella, evoking the contemporary world in crisis, is a distinctive literary contribution to our concept of the Anthropocene.

Literary fiction  |  English sample translation available

Flora – poet and journalist Jonáš Zbořil’s prose debut – is a melancholic dystopia on the margins of existence, interwoven with references, paraphrases, and quotations. In a world where ecological catastrophes are everyday occurrences, a couple in crisis encounter a strange creature while walking through the inner periphery. Sára projects her unfulfilled maternal desires onto the creature, which has fungi growing on it as well as a jumble of cables and wires, and she decides they’ll live together in an abandoned area that is being reclaimed by nature. In place of a standard plot, the author has opted for the power of the imagination, and in original metaphors he links clusters and structural supports with hawthorns and song thrushes to form a poetic, mutated nature. The various acknowledged references, such as Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi films, mirror the theme of a form that is grown into, and strengthens the atmosphere of uncertainty from which a new beginning might emerge – or a sudden end.

Jonáš Zbořil (1988) is a writer, poet and journalist. He graduated in Czech and English from Charles University’s Faculty of Education. He has headed the cultural section of the Seznam Zprávy website since 2022. In 2013 he published the poetry collection Podolí, which was nominated for the Jiří Orten Award and the Magnesia Litera Award for Discovery of the Year. In 2022 he published the collection Nová divočina (The New Wilderness). His novella Flora (2024) is his prose debut.