I Served The King Of England

The fantasising and storytelling deliver a body blow of total irreverence to the solemn mythopoeia of monumental historiography * Times Literary Supplement *
Hrabal bounces and floats. His mode is a sort of dancing realism, somewhere between fairytale and satire.He is a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humour and a hushed tenderness of detail. We should read him
Well worth reading * The Book Magazine *
A master of rueful comedy and tender eroticism, Hrabal was, for all his eccentricity, a major figure in 20th-century world literature.

Bohumil Hrabal Born in 1914 in Brno-Zidenice, Moravia, Bohumil Hrabal received a degree in Law from Prague’s Charles University and lived in Prague from the late 1940s. In the 1950s, he worked as a manual laborer in the Kladno ironworks, drawing inspiration for the “hyper-realist” texts he was writing at that time. He gained international acclaim for works such as I Served the King of England and Too Loud a Solitude. Hrabal is considered, alongside Jaroslav Hasek and Karel Capek, one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century, and perhaps the most important in the post-war period. He died in February 1997.

Adam Thirlwell Born in London in 1978, Adam Thirlwell is the author of three previous novels, translated into thirty languages. His essays appear in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is an advisory editor of the Paris Review. His awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2018, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has twice been selected by Granta as one of their Best of Young British Novelists.

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