Jana Bodnárová:

Tiene papradia / Shades of Bracken

The novel is the story of journalist Oča, who sets out to photograph a dying forest and remembers her childhood on the way. She is engulfed by a world of rural myths and superstitions, but also by the stories and fates of the people who surrounded her - her grandmother, regarded as the village witch, her mother, horrified by the rural world and running away from the family, a doctor branded by the "dark deviation" of his interest in young girls, or a painter watched by the regime, who awakens within her a desire for the adventurous quest for knowledge. The author approaches this world, "decorated with emotion and encumbered by passions spilling over into dark superstitions", through magical images and strongly poetised language. For the author, childhood represents one of the intrinsic components of the life of every human individual and any society. In this novel, Bodnárová, regarded as a representative of postmodernism in Slovak literature, has created a full-blooded, eloquently composed story, which is one of the most outstanding works of Slovak prose.

Ján Buzássy:

Zlatý rez / The Golden Section

The golden section as the ideal visual proportion of an image is the principle on the background of which the author perceives the classical sign and its symbolic value. The sonnet V prachu dní (In the Dust of Days) at the very beginning of the book serves as an important indicator of how to read the symbolism of key substantives in all the other, free verses: Villon, Homer, Apollo, runner, disc - all of these words connecting us with antiquity and antiquity with us. Buzássy attempts to write non-rhetorical poetry - ideation. Here, poetry lays bare the cultural codes of the industrial world and compares them to the golden section of anticising classics, seen through the prism of the author's civil experience. The poetic irony of Brooks' The Well Wrought Urn as the manifestation of the poem's context through its individual elements finds here an implementation of almost laboratory purity - it overcomes the diffuseness of the meaning of Habermas' "Lifeworld" through the comparison of contradictory, ambivalent or diverse contextual qualities (in the most modern sense of Empson's ambiguity).

Dušan Dušek:

Pešo do neba / On Foot to Heaven

Dušek's collage of stories is the evocation of memories of his grandfather's house, which "has only taken one step in the whole century. And that was backwards". In this book, as in all of his works, Dušek is revealed as a master of epic detail, of a multitude of trivial, "unnoticed" stories, often based merely on the precise observation of authentic fact from the rich history of his family from his native region of Záhorie, whose patriarch is the narrator's grandfather: a bank manager and fire chief, a colourful character, bearing his fate with winning humour and wisdom. The second storyline is formed by the diary entries of his grandson from the mid-80s to the summer of 2000. These two storylines meet and supplement each other in miniaturised segments, and with this, Dušek has managed to create a non-traditional, artistic and engaging epic about the twisting, often bizarre, but always very human fates of one community.

Erik Jakub Groch:

Tuláčik a Klára / The Little Tramp and Clara

A book of exceptional fairy tales created in the Saint Exupéry genre of the enchanting dialogue between a child (in this case symbolised by the stray puppy Little Tramp) and a fairytale being: fox, flower and star are represented here by the ethereal angelic identity of the little girl Clara, who shows Little Tramp the basic rules of life. "The seven fairytales open the door to the understandingof the world around us, but also of the world in ourselves," says the author about the stories. It is an emotional and ethical explanation of great philosophical truths aimed at children who are just starting to read. In this respect he reaches, loftily and with exceptional artistry, as far as the celestial horizon of The Little Prince - by revealing the secrets and adventure of everyday things, when a tuxedo and lesson in good manners can become a pirate flag and a boat trip to the tropical shores of fantasy.

Mila Haugová:

Dáma s jednorožcom / Lady with a Unicorn

In Lady with a Unicorn, Ferlinghetti's "sad naked horsewoman" from the mid-20^th century somehow returned, contriving and desirous, seeking the origin of the myth of sexuality in bygone ages and in her own fresh spirit. It is the poetry of a concrete living relationship, as shown by the dedication of certain texts. These seventy poems reflect a view of the world of man and woman, as if the author has examined them through the eye of a bee. The fantastic reconstruction of the beginnings of the word, symbol, idea is, however, anchored by numerous references to philosophers - from Aristotle through Buber to Wittgenstein - while remaining a factually clear and at the same time poetically luxuriant image. The unicorn is not merely an erotic symbol seen through the eyes of a woman and poet, but is also arché - a hieroglyph which carries forgotten meanings, "torn from time in shadowless existence", the primeval sense "of texts curled up deep in the womb". The sexuality here is not only directed towards the erotic formulation of letters in verse, but mainly from the birth of culture from the moist womb of textuality itself.

Michal Hvorecký:

Lovci a zberači / Hunters and Gatherers

The young writer Michal Hvorecký (1976) attracted attention by the original techniques used in his debut Silný pocit čistoty (A Strong Feeling of Purity, 1998), which literary critics labelled as postmodern. In his second book of novellas Hunters and Gatherers (2002), he was inspired by pop culture and its genres, such as television series (sitcoms), horror stories, cyberpunk, but also the shopping novel (the world of supermarkets), etc. He treats these themes with a brilliant narrative art, employing characteristic traits and approaches of successful forms of mass culture while simultaneously parodying them. Hvorecký sees the world through the lens of cybernetics and information systems, which are not only changing the world, but reaching deep into the human consciousness. His prose is associated with authors such as Thomas Pyncheon, William Gibson or Jack Womack, whose cult novel Ambient he translated into Slovak.

Ján Johanides:

Trestajúci zločin / Punishing Crime

Ján Johanides (1934) entered literature at the beginning of the 1960s, strongly influenced by French existentialism, as shown by the frequent motifs of alienation, fear, anxiety and isolation in his prose. He later also focused on socially more relevant themes, but the internal problems of the individual continued to be the centre of his attention. This is also true of the novella Punishing Crime (1995), in which he returns to the times of communist totality and condemns the terror, political trials and harsh conditions in prisons of that period. But he is most interested in the problem of evil in man, which breaks out (just like good, which is, however, much more seldom) at unexpected moments and for irrational reasons. The unfathomability of human behaviour and actions is the main theme of all of Johanides' prosaic works. Their aesthetic effect is augmented by the tension between their cruel content and the artistic way in which they are conveyed.

Dušan Mitana:

Krst ohňom / Baptism of Fire

This book of nine stories by a leading representative of late 20^th century Slovak literature is mainly interesting because the author attempts to explain his intellectual transformation from eternal rebel to christologically oriented messianist.
In this sense the author reworks or recreates his earlier stories and gives them a new content and interpretation. Mitana somehow tests his non-conformist heroes with the fire of hell, in which they become a new substance not fitting into the old discredited world where they were conceived, but ready to serve the new world. They gain a new identity marked by the approaching victory of Christ. At the same time Mitana's stories do not lose their provocativeness and ferocity for new knowledge.

Rudolf Sloboda:

Láska / Love

Štefan Strážay:

Interiér / Interior

For three decades, Strážay's poetry has attracted attention with its lyrical individuality based on the precise naming of things and their relationships and on a discreet, gentle and often only hinted-at response to his own human situation. In his collection Interior one also finds "the uncovered poetic I", his personal human presence in a poem. The author's definition of his own poetics is characterised most accurately in the title poem of the collection: "Closed stories, /unrelated to each other, they are/ so objective/ and affectable,/ that you cannot, do not decide/ to forget,/ just omit. Hence you talk about them." Compared with his previous collections - Palina (Wormwood), Elégia (Elegy), Sestra (Sister) - one finds more reflections on the last things of man. Strážay's poetry precisely articulates our human situation and makes it more bearable without gratuitous poses and pathos. It therefore does not lose its attraction for the reader.

Vincent Šikula:

Ornament / Ornament

The first book in a planned trilogy (the second volume, Veterná ružica [The Weathercock], was published in 1995), which the most eloquent narrator of modern Slovak prose actually spent his whole life writing and never finished. It records the ideologically most complex period of Slovak history. The autobiographical and intimate story of young Matej Hóz and his friend, a vanished priest, depicts the human situation in the harshest period of the communist dictatorship and is a parable about human fear, but also the disturbed survival of normal human relationships. This bipolarity is a source of unrepeatable tension, mysterious human solidarity, even lyricism, which ultimately flows into an ambiguous apotheosis of art and human creativity.

Pavel Vilikovský:

Posledný kôň Pompejí / The Last Horse of Pompeii

Since his entry into literature in the 60s, Pavel Vilikovský (1941) has been among those prose writers who attract the attention of critics and readers, as proved by his various awards and translations of several of his books. The novel The Last Horse of Pompeii is one of his supreme achievements. In it, he draws on his own experience (a study stay in London around twenty years ago), but this is only a primary impulse in the subject. All of Vilikovský's prose is based on accurate analyses of emotional states (he understands emotionality as a constant trait of human nature), through which he discloses the motives of human activities, and these are not usually very noble. Vilikovský has eloquently intellectualised Slovak prose and extended the boundaries of narration, and thereby also the boundaries of the perception of a work of art.