Pavel Kolmačka: Serious and other things
– Czechia
Pavel Kolmačka is a writer and poet born in Prague in 1962. He graduated from the Czech Technical University in Prague and did religious studies at Masaryk University in Brno. He worked as an orderly and as a secondary school teacher and is now a freelance translator. He is the author of five collections of spiritual poetry – most recently The Life of People, Animals, Plants, Bees (2018). He also wrote a collection of diary entries One Sentence (2012), the novels Footprints Beyond the Horizon (2006) and Canto Ostinato (2023). “To say on account of a three-hundred-and-fifty page novel that Pavel Kolmačka weighs every word as a poet would probably sound strange,” writes Ondřej Horák about the new releases. “So let’s put it in another way – everything that is here is somehow essential from the characters’ point of view. And most of the time, these are serious things.”