Milan Děžinský © privat
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Milan Děžinský (b. 1974 in Kyjov) is one of the outstanding Czech poets of his generation and has the potential to become a classic. He trained as a teacher of Czech and English in Ústí nad Labem, where he also began his literary activities by founding a student magazine in the early 1990s. Since then he has published numerous volumes of verse. In his poems he explores the “secret life” of the everyday. The poetic “I” in Děžinský’s poems sees through everyday imagery into the entropic cosmos of contrary references and a non-linear time that is banished into matter. Milan Děžinský translates such writers as Emily Dickinson, Phil Norton, Bruce Dawe and W.C. Williams from the English. His poetics are influenced by the reading of Anglophone poetry. Děžinský has been nominated for the Magnesia Litera literary prize for poetry several times and in 2014 for the Dresden Poetry Prize. In 2016 he was the inaugural winner of the International Václav Burian Poetry Prize. His poems, criticism and translations have appeared in magazines and anthologies. Poetic networking is important to him, leading him among other things to initiate the annual anthology of ‘The Best Czech Poems’. He works as an English teacher and lives in Roudnice nad Labem, where he has also been a city councillor since 2010.
Publications:
Černá hodinka, Velarium 1996
Kašel mé milenky, Host 1997
Slovník noci, Host 2003
Přízraky, Host 2007
Tajný život, Host 2012
Obcházení ostrova, Host 2017