Jan Folný: A negligible chance to change

– Czechia

On his website janfolny.cz, he says the following about himself: “I was born in Karlovy Vary in 1977 and studied at the Faculty of Education of University of West Bohemia in Plzeň. I am a teacher of Czech and Russian, currently fairly burnt-out. I live in London at the present time.” He authored three prose books: The novel Od sebe / k sobě (Pull / Push, 2010), short story colelction Buzíčci (Little Queers, 2013) and the novel Víkend v Londýně (Weekend in London, 2018). The blurb on his last book reads as follows: “The average lifespan of a Czech man is seventy-six years, which means that if you’re a man and you’re forty, you’ve entered the second half of your life. The worse half. You start feeling anxious about the time you have left, who you’ve become and who you’ll never be. The chance you could change seems negligible and you begin to realise the finiteness of your life...”