Simona Bohatá

Simona Bohatá spent her adolescence in Prague’s Žižkov district, which had a great influence on her, as did the Prague music and theatre scene of the 1980s. Her novel Lucky Beny (2021) follows a young photographer coming of age in communist Czechoslovakia. Escaping a violent home and the pressures of compulsory military service, he finds an unlikely refuge among outsiders living and working at a Prague scrapyard. The novel was a finalist for the 2022 Magnesia Litera Award. Bohatá is also an acclaimed short fiction writer, with two short story collections published in Czech.

Milan Děžinský

Milan Děžinský (b. 1974) is a Czech poet, the author of eight poetry collections. In 2018, he won the Magnesia Litera Award for poetry, a coveted annual literary award in the Czech Republic. His books have been translated into English, German and Polish, and several poems have been published in US and UK magazines, such as The New York Review of Books, Poetry London, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Dark Horse and PN Review, as well as the Prague-based B O D Y. Děžinský’s work expands on the tradition of Deep Image and is influenced by poets such as James Wright, Tomas Tranströmer and Sylvia Plath. He lives in Roudnice nad Labem where he is an English teacher and also a town councillor.

Gravitation, the selected poetry of Milan Děžinský, translated by Nathan Fields, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in March 2026.

Jitka Bret Srbová

Jitka Bret Srbová (b. 1976) is a Czech poet, editor and journalist. From 2006 to 2011, she was the editor-in-chief of the literary online almanac Wagon. She currently contributes to the fortnightly literary journal Tvar. She is the author of five collections, including The Forest (2016), and, most recently, In Defense of Small Things (2025). Her books have been translated into German and Polish, and her individual poems have appeared in several other languages, including English. She lives in Hořovice in Central Bohemia.

Jitka Esserová

Jitka Esserová is an editor, author and an enthusiastic cyclist. She graduated in Czech Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, and as an affiliate student joined the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London. For many years, she worked in marketing and communications for a multinational technology company but eventually returned to her field: she is interested in children’s reading literacy, works as a freelance editor of children’s books, and runs the How to Make a Beautiful Children’s Book programme for school groups at the Czech Children’s Book Centre. She occasionally translates from English. Her book for younger school children, How to Speak to the Queen, was published by Běžíliška.

Petr Hruška

Petr Hruška (b. 1964) is a poet and literary historian whose work has received numerous awards, including the Czech State Award for Literature (To No Travail, 2012) and the Magnesia Litera Award (I Caught Sight of My Face, 2023). His poetry, which often explores history and human nature, has been translated into several languages. In 2023, his first volume of poetry in English, Everything Indicates: Selected Poems (translated by Jonathan Bolton), was published by Blue Diode Press. Alongside his writing, he co-organises literary events, edits a literary magazine, and advocates for environmental and cultural preservation. He works at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, where he specialises in modern Czech poetry.