The decision was made by a ten member jury headed by the literary historian, Jiří Brabec. Havel is to take over the Seifert Prize personally at the beginning of October. The ceremony will take place in the St Anne Church in Prague reconstruction of which he was promoting. Seifert Prize is linked to a financial award of 300 thousand Czech Crowns.
Václav Havel (1936), one of the main leaders of Charter 77 civic initiative in the 1970s and 1980s, wrote The Power of the Powerless, Letters to Olga, and a wide range of plays and dramatic texts such as Audience, The Memorandum, Largo Desolato and Temptation.
The prestigious Seifert Prize was awarded to him for the eighth volume of his Works published at the end of last year by Torst Publishing House. The book is a collection of Havel’s speeches and essays from 1999 – 2007, but it also includes his literary output from the time after his presidency – specifically the book Please, be brief, a collage of impressions, memories, notes and practical instructions that resulted from Havel’s dialogues with the Czech journalist Karel Hvížďala.
The other work is Havel’s play Leaving directed in the Czech Republic by David Radok. The play had recently its first premiere abroad in London where it was directed by the artistic director of the Orange Tree Theatre Sam Walters who said Leaving was one of the best plays by Václav Havel.