Overview

Translated by David Short Foreword by Rajendra Chitins Burying the Season is an affectionate, multi-layered account of small town life in central Europe beginning in the early 1930s and ending in the 21st Century. Adapting scenes from Fellini’s Amarcord, Bajaja’s meandering narrative weaves humour, tragedy and historical events into a series of compelling nostalgic anecdotes. The ex-King of Bulgaria, a future president with the unfortunate name Goose, strange visitors and eccentric locals are just a few of the peculiar, but very human, characters drawn by the author experiencing the wonder and disillusionment of their everyday lives. Zlín, Bajaja’s hometown, with its Bauhaus inspired architecture, built by its major employer Baťa Shoes, feature prominently. Friends and family walk, skate, swim, quarrel, love and fall into the local river Dřevnice; disappearing and re-appearing, surviving changing times while their children play Swallows and Amazons. As an essay in remembering, it offers hope.

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'Nabokov meets Fellini in this tragicomic autobiographical narrative about growing up in provincial post-WWII Czechoslovakia' - Andrei Rogatchevski, Institute of Language and Culture, the Arctic University of Norway UiT

Author Information

Antonín Bajaja was born into a well-known medical family in the small Moravian industrial town of Zlín on 30 May 1942. He began writing in the 1960s while studying at the University of Agriculture in Brno and after graduating spent much of his life working for livestock co-operatives. In the 1990s, he joined Radio Brno as an editor and began writing journalism, poetry and fiction. In addition to English, his work has been published in Russian, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Slovene. In 2004, he won the Magnesia Litera Prize for his novel Zvlčení [Growing Wild] and was awarded the Czech State Prize for Literature in 2010 for the original Czech edition of Burying the Season. Zvlčení was also shortlisted for the 2017 St Petersburg Library Prize for Foreign Fiction. He is an active member of Czech PEN.

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