Pavel Šrut: Czech Republic Author

Poet, translator, and prose writer, Pavel Šrut was born on April 13, 1940 in Prague. He studied English and Spanish at Charles University (Prague) from 1962-1967 and then worked as an editor for the publishing house Nase Vojsko. In 1987, he spent four months at the University of Iowa as a Writer in Residence.

Šrut is the lone poet among the influential generation of Czech poets from the 1960s who from the outset of his career dedicated himself equally to the craft of poetry and children's literature. Šrut initially began with children's verse and then expanded to all genres including adaptations of fairy tales for television and screenplays for animated films. From the beginning of his career, Šrut has balanced the relationship of sense and nonsense in his writing by interweaving motifs from nursery rhymes, singsongs, and games in his verse.

Night Full of Wings (Noc pina kridel, 1964) was Šrut's first published book. This collection of poems provides sensitive insight into a childhood and adolescence troubled by the grim experience of war. During the years of the Soviet occupation, Šrut had limited opportunities to publish his work and thus concentrated mostly on writing children's books and song lyrics. In the 1970s and 1980s some of his work was published abroad, as was the case with his collection, Unbound Poems, which includes poems written to his close friends.

Among his numerous honors, Pavel Šrut was awarded the top Czech literary prize, the Jaroslav Seifert Literary Award, in 2000. In 2002 and 2004, he was nominated for the influential Magnesia Litera which he was awarded in 2009 for his book, The Oddsockeaters. This fantastical amusing story captures children's curiosity and imagination, yet is based on a real-life dilemma - socks that seem to be missing their mate. In 2004, 2005, and 2009, Šrut won the Czech Golden Ribbon for the best children's book of the year.

Besides being an acclaimed writer, Šrut is a skilled translator of English and American poetry. His translations include works by Donald Graves, Dylan Thomas, John Updike, and Leonard Cohen, as well as children's books by Roald Dahl, Angela Carter, and Arnold Lobel. Pavel Šrut also published a collection of rock lyrics in 1990 entitled Dormitory Yesterday (Kolej yesterday).