Jan Novák
Jan Novák was born in 1953 in Kolín, but lived in Chicago from 1970 to 2008, where he studied at the University of Chicago. He made his literary debut with the short story collection Striptýz Chicago. His first novel, The Wyllis Dream Kit, was submitted for the Pulitzer Prize and earned him the Carl Sandburg Award for Chicago Book of the Year in 1985.
This was followed by the novel The Grand Life and the non-fiction book Commies, Crooks, Gypsies, Spooks & Poets, for which he received another Sandburg Award in 1992. By that time, he was earning a living as a writer. His novel Grandpa won the Josef Škvorecký Prize while his earlier “true novel” So Far, So Good receive the Magnesia Litera Book of the Year award in 2004.
In recent years, writing in Czech again, Novák published, among other things, a biography of the most famous Czech author Milan Kundera: His Czech Life and Times and an autobiographical report about the time he worked as an armored courier in Chicago around the turn of the century, Underpaid, but Armed. He is the recepien. He is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the Egon Hostovský Prize, the Egon Ervín Kisch Prize, and the Revolver Revue Prize.
Since 2016, with Jaromir 99, he has published three graphic novels. Zátopek, Čáslavská and So Far, So Good, which were translated into 11 languages. In 2018, they released another comic, Zatím dobrý, which has also been published in German, Spanish, and English. In 2020, they collaborated on a third graphic novel, Čáslavská, published in Germany.
Novák learned the craft of filmmaking alongside Miloš Forman while working on his film Valmont. He also co-wrote Forman’s autobiography The Turnaround, published in 21 languages. He later collaborated with directors Ivan Passer, Maximilian Schell, Juraj Jakubisko, Petr Nikolaev, David Ondříček, and others. He wrote the screenplays for the films The Wonderful Years that Sucked and Broken Promise.
Together with his son Adam, he directed the documentary films Citizen Havel Goes on Vacation, Citizen Havel Is Rolling the Empties and Guns, Pucks, Beer & Dogs. With Martin Froyda, he collaborated on a documentary version of the greatest story of the Cold War, entitled Escape to Berlin. He is also the author of an upcoming documentary Chairman Must Always Win. It covers twelve years in the passionate life of a rabbit breeders association in a small village.
At the Astorka Theatre in Bratislava, Novák’s play Tolstoj a peníze was performed between 2008 and 2016, following the theatre’s staging of his adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Vražda sekerou ve Sv. Petěrburgu from 2000 to 2010. His English translations of Václav Havel’s one-act plays and Zahradní slavnost have been performed throughout the English-speaking world.