Jan Němec

Jan Němec (b. 1981) is a Czech novelist, journalist and screenwriter. His novel A History of Light (2013) blends fiction and biography to portray the life of early-twentieth-century Czech photographer František Drtikol against the backdrop of Central European history. It won the EU Prize for Literature and has been translated into twelve languages. In 2019, he published his second novel, Ways of Writing about Love, which examines the beginning, middle and end of a five-year relationship through a self-reflexive narrative. In 2025, he and Czech writer Jana Šrámková co-authored the experimental work of fiction Apartment (2025). He is currently working on a large-scale novel drawing on Czechoslovak psychiatric LSD research conducted behind the Iron Curtain from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s.