The deadline for the next round of applications for authors’ travel grants is May 31, 2026.

Czech Literary Centre (CLC), a section of the Moravian Library (ML), reminds applicants of the upcoming deadline for its programme supporting Czech authors’ participation in literary events abroad. Organisers of such events, as well as authors or illustrators, may apply for support for events taking place between September 1, 2026 and December 15, 2026. The application deadline is May 31, 2026.

Individual applications will be assessed by the CLC travel grants commission, which determines the grant level and makes its recommendations to the ML regarding grant allocations.

Detailed information for authors and organisers, including conditions and mandatory application forms, can be found HERE.

[ ]

This call is intended for literary events taking place outside German-speaking countries. Those interested in events in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland (authors, translators, or organisers) can apply under the CZECHIA 2026 travel grants programme. The deadline for these events, which must take place between July 1, 2026 and December 15, 2026, is March 31, 2026. Detailed information about support for events in German-speaking countries, including the mandatory application forms, can be found HERE.

A selection of Czech comics published in 2020-2025.

A selection of Czech books for children and young adults published in 2023-2025.

A selection of 2025 Czech prose, poetry, children’s and YA books and comics.

The true story of a Marian miracle in the Czech borderlands reveals the limits of mutual trust and faith, as well as the hardships faced by strong women within the patriarchal society of the late nineteenth century.

Writer and screenwriter Sára Zeithammerová’s second novel was inspired by a Marian miracle in Suchý Důl in the Broumov region. In the late nineteenth century, the Virgin Mary was said to have appeared several times to fourteen-year-old Kristina. The author uses this historically documented event to construct a convincing fictional world populated by ambiguous characters. The novel’s momentum is driven by an unusually chosen unreliable narrator—Kristina’s widowed mother Aloisie. Although she is initially sceptical of her daughter’s vision, the crowds of pilgrims streaming into the village come to her inn’s rescue during a time of particular hardship. The two prominent female figures repeatedly come up against the limits of patriarchal society. Conventional yet fresh in its storytelling, the novel rests on the solid foundations of thorough historical research and thoughtful composition. With a creeping sense of unease, the author captures the intense relationship between mother and daughter, the shifting mood within the village community, and the tension between faith as an intimate experience and a source of social pressure.

A novel about a woman who, trapped by faith, debt and maternal devotion, loses control over her own body and life and painfully searches for the way back to herself.

In the novel Beliefs, Anna Beata Háblová follows the fate of a woman whose life is gradually falling apart under the pressure of her economic situation and the conflict between personal failures and internally adopted dogmas. Without moralizing, the novel offers a sensitive, socially critical view of sex work, while capturing the inner struggle of a woman who wants to escape a violent environment but runs up against manipulation, obedience and her own inability to resist. Intimate scenes are replaced by the unconventional motif of cooking—recipes become both an escape strategy and an image of inner tension. A surprising political dimension also enters the personal story, along with the motif of faith in transformation, which may be either salvation or illusion.

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.

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.

A disturbing story of abuse and hope styled as an audio recorded confession with the pace of a flight.

After having won over critics and the public alike in 2020 with her second novel The Ballerinas, Miřenka Čechová has produced another novel with a serious and compelling theme: what impact does child abuse have on a person’s future? When Laura was fourteen, her mother jumped from a window. Although she survived, Laura, who had no-one else to look after her while her mother remained confined to her bed, ended up in a children’s home. She was looked after by the ‘aunts’, while her new siblings were mainly disabled and Romany children. Someone else came to the home, however—a thirty-year- old male primary school teacher, who taught at the children’s home in his spare time, but who was also scheming to seduce the underage Laura. What might initially appear as an innocent children’s romance transforms into a horrific study of manipulation and abuse. Laura narrates all of this with the detachment of a prostitute from a luxurious boudoir, and tells her story—full of revelations, accusations and sharp analyses of social hypocrisy—as an audio recording of her own voice, intended to be heard by the one who caused it all.

Just as Kundera’s first novel continues to challenge readers with the question of what the central joke in The Joke actually is, Beneš’s novel presents a similar challenge by asking which era is coming to an end.

After his successful debut with A Slight Loss of Loneliness, Eli Beneš based his second novel on more conventional ingredients: the midlife crisis of a man and his journey from a dysfunctional family into the arms of a younger lover; working in the corporate world; artificial intelligence threatening to replace creative human labour; and a novel about writing a novel. From these conventional yet rewarding elements, Beneš has crafted a novel with references to other works and the plausibility of its narrative, while simultaneously confronting its playful storytelling with the weighty theme of a life unravelling—placing burdens on the protagonist’s shoulders which are almost too much to bear. Against these compelling backdrops, a subtle exploration unfolds of a person whose soul is wounded by the dystopian pressures of change, which emerges as the novel’s central and original theme. The atmosphere is heightened by a gentle satire and a sense of strangeness, preventing the novel from being read as a straightforward commentary on our present day and instead guiding the reader towards the search for meanings of broader, symbolic significance.

A fascinating literary experiment about what happens when two people live in the same apartment but never meet each other.

The Apartment by Jana Šrámková and Jan Němec is a novel born from the idea of showing what happens when two different perspectives are not unified by a single, overarching voice. The two narrators, Zuzana and Daniel, share an apartment, yet each of them inhabits it differently and at different times—she during the week, he only at weekends. Their stories begin at opposite ends of the book and collide in the middle. Zuzana processes her grief through metaphors and constant self-examination; her language often falters, as if constantly searching for an audience for her own thoughts. Contrastingly, Daniel observes reality in a restrained, objective manner; for him, the apartment is principally somewhere to rest, sleep and find some quiet refuge. The two perspectives both complement and contrast with one another, and it is only their alternation which reveals the true shape of the story. The book comes alive in many different forms once the reader realises it can be read in any order and that its individual parts can be interrupted at random. The form of two voices which never come into contact yet mirror one another creates a carefully conceived literary experiment about solitude, the need for self-discovery and the tension between intimate and shared space.