Premia Bohemica Prize 2025

We cordially invite you to the award ceremony of the Premia Bohemica Prize 2025, which this year will be presented to the Japanese Bohemist Kenichi Abe.

The program will include a lecture by the laureate entitled Translations and Paratexts in the Works of Milan Kundera.

The event is organized by the Moravian Library in Brno in cooperation with the Faculty of Education, Charles University, which will host the ceremony this year at its premises in Celetná 13.

Kenichi Abe, Assoc. Prof., teaches Central European literature and comparative literature at the University of Tokyo. As a translator, he has introduced dozens of Czech works into Japanese, including those by Bohumil Hrabal, Václav Havel, and Bianca Bellová. In 2015, he received the Best Translation Award in Japan for his translation of Patrik Ouředník’s Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century.

The Premia Bohemica Prize is awarded by the Czech Association of Slavists to foreign Bohemists for their outstanding contribution to the dissemination of the Czech language and literature worldwide. More about the Premia Bohemica Prize.

Further events connected with the laureate’s visit to the Czech Republic:

• 21 October 2025 – lecture by Prof. Abe at the Moravian Library in Brno

• A new publication containing Prof. Abe’s bibliography of translations and studies will be released before 23 October 2025