Jaroslav Rudiš, author, screenwriter, playwright, publicist, musician.
He was born in 1972 in Turnov, Czechoslovakia. He studied German language and literature, history and journalism in Liberec, Prague, Zurich and Berlin. He has worked as a concierge, teacher and journalist. In 2012/13, he held the Siegfried-Unseld Visiting Professorship at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Rudiš is the author of numerous Czech and German-language novels, radio plays, theatre plays, cinema screenplays, essays and music projects. As a journalist, he regularly works for international media, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt, Deutschlandfunk, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, WDR, SWR, BR, MDR, Czech Radio and the BBC.
The history of Central Europe and the ghosts of the past are a recurring theme in Rudiš’s works. He uses this motif in particular in his second novel “Grandhotel”, which is set in Liberec, a border town between the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany, and also in the novel “Vom Ende des Punks in Helsinki”, which was published in German in 2014 and deals with the punk scene in the ČSSR and the GDR as well as current issues such as gentrification. His novels “Der Himmel unter Berlin” and “Die Stille in Prag” also reflect on the history of the German-Czech relationship and its places of longing. His novel “Nationalstraße” focuses on the period after the fall of communism in the Czech Republic and Central Europe, while in his novella “Böhmisches Paradies” he has sixteen men sweating in a sauna and telling each other stories. In February 2019, Luchterhand published his novel “Winterbergs letzte Reise”, his first novel in German. It is a wintry, tragicomic railway journey from Berlin to Sarajevo through the history of Central Europe.
Rudiš’ novels have been translated into German, Polish, Serbian, Swedish, Ukrainian, French, Finnish, Dutch, Spanish and Italian and have been adapted for stage, radio and film.
As a musician, Rudiš founded the band Jaromír 99 & The Bombers together with Jaromír 99 in 2007 and the Kafka Band in 2013, which musically realised the novel fragments “The Castle” and “America” by Franz Kafka.
In 2014, he received the Usedom Literature Prize for his “important Czech voice in the concert of contemporary European literature” and thus his contribution to “European dialogue”, as the jury chaired by Hellmuth Karasek announced.
In 2018, he received the 2018 Prize of the Houses of Literature.
Jaroslav Rudiš writes in Czech and German and lives as a freelance author in Berlin and Lomnice nad Popelkou in the Bohemian Paradise.
For the WIENER WORTSTAETTEN he wrote the play „Richtung Reichenberg“, which was presented in a staged reading for the Kollektivsalon Anschlussfähig 2020 at the Burgtheater Kasino.
The short play was also published within the anthology “Anschlussfähig”.