Jan Novák: Life, the Times, and Money
– Czechia
Born in 1953 in Kolín, he emigrated with his parents to Austria in 1969, and since 1970 he had lived in the USA. He studied humanities at the University of Chicago, and is now a freelance writer and translator. He is the author of numerous plays, film and comic scripts, book interviews, and, above all prose books (most recently Těžký prachy, Heavy Money, 2022). He gained significant attention with his novel So Far, So Good (2004), the sripts for the comics Zátopek (2016) and Čáslavská (2018; both with Jaromír 99), and as the co-author of the autobiographies of Miloš Forman (Turnaround: A Memoir, 2013) and Lubomír Kaválek (Rozehraný život, Opened Life, 2023) and as a biographer of Milan Kundera (Kundera: Český život a doba, Kundera: Czech Life and the Times, 2020 ). He occasionally works on documentary films and translations.