Literary fiction, Short stories

Nudists, dune experts, male prostitutes, Dante, water birds and Ducati motorcycles all intertwine in this collection of poetic short stories.

Petr Borkovec is best known for his poetry. His nine collections have been published in almost every European language, including English, German and Italian. This time, Borkovec has written a collection of short stories. The prose in Lido di Dante excels, with the author’s specific sense of humour, mysterious and dramatic atmosphere, poetic imagery and condensed phrasing. The twelve short stories take place in a resort near Ravenna, Italy. An unusual guide to this place of sunshine and darkness, Lido di Dante, sometimes brings to mind the Divine Comedy, the infernal scene of which Dante started to write in the eerie local pine forest.

Petr Borkovec (1970) is a translator and poet, recipient of many awards for his poetry including South Tyrol’s Norbert C Kaser Award and Germany’s Hubert Burda Award. His poems have been published in most European languages including English and German. At the start of the 1990s he began working for the literary review Souvislosti, he has also worked as a newspaper proofreader, the editor of newspaper literary and cultural sections and later as a publishing editor and translator from Russian. He has also translated several ancient and Korean texts into verse. From 2005 to 2023 he organised well-known author reading nights at Prague’s Café Fra.