Jan Němec

– Czechia

Born in Brno in 1981, Němec studied Religions and Sociology at Masaryk University in Brno. He works for the Host Publishing House as editor of books and of a journal. He has published a book of poetry called První život (The First Life, 2007), a short story collection Hra pro čtyři ruce (A Play at Four Hands, 2009) and the novels Dějiny světla (A History of Light, 2013) and Možnosti milostného románu (The Possibilities of a Love Novel, 2019). In the blurb to his new book, he says: “This is a novel about love and writing in the age of digital sadness. In the book I study five years of a love affair and another two years in which I was writing it. There is a lot of passion, tears and also several epiphanies. It’s a novel about why we are with one another, what we love about us, and why we still break up.”