An Evening for Pavel Růžek

There are people who write for a living – and there are people who live to write. Pavel Ružek (1951–2011) was undoubtedly one of the latter. He sacrificed everything to writing, including those close to him and his health. However, unlike most such ragged souls he left behind genuinely notable work that ought to become part of the Czech literary canon. This includes not only his extremely raw short stories in the collections Bez kůže (Without Skin) (2010), Bez růže (Without a Rose) (2011) and Bez tebe (Without You) (2022) but also the pose works Budižkničemu (The Good-For-Nothing), Mistr světa (Master of the World) and Obyčejný ráj (Ordinary Paradise), which came out even before the Velvet Revolution.