Klára Novotná

Adéla Horáčková edits the Czech translation list at Světlo editions. She reads for a living—manuscripts, proofs, submissions, the endless pile of words that require her judgment. She has opinions about annotators (dense margins can mean either serious engagement or an inability to tolerate uncertainty). She has a linden tree outside her window whose branches scrape against the glass with a sound like a patient mind insisting on something. She has read all three novels by Stefan Brandt, the German novelist whose work she has never quite acquired, though she has passed recommendations to colleagues with notes about conflicts of interest she has not specified. Stefan Brandt writes novels about ordinary things that accumulate weight—marriages ending, small towns revisited, the particular heaviness of weather that means something other than weather. He has been on prize juries with Adéla before. In Warsaw in 2018, they disagreed about a Belarusian novel—she thought it formally accomplished but emotionally manipulative; he thought the manipulation was the argument. In Krakow in 2021, they argued about Clarice Lispector for forty minutes while an audience watched and the moderator gave up. The argument was unresolved in a way that was not unsatisfying. Three years later, neither has forgotten it. Now they are on the inaugural Central European Literary Prize jury together. Six weeks, six books, weekly deliberation sessions in a restored building just off Národní třída. The format is straightforward: one session per book, a final decision by consensus. Věra Nováková, who runs the prize, has confidence in the jury's ability to resolve disagreement through argument. What she may not anticipate is that Adéla and Stefan have been having this argument for years—in different rooms, about different books, always arriving at opposite conclusions that are coherent, internally consistent, well evidenced, and completely irreconcilable. He thinks difficulty in fiction can be an argument