Čepec – Kucbelová Katarína (2021)

Slovak writer and cultural manager Katarína Kucbelová (* 1979) published her debut prose work Čepiec in 2019, sixteen years after her first poetry collection, to which she has since added three more poetry volumes. Čepiec contains elements of ethnographic texts, factual literature, travel reports, soul-searching literature, as well as personal confessions, and it could likely be identified with even more genre traces. However, what is more important is that all the mentioned and unmentioned ingredients are united by poetic imagination and an unidealizing realism. The author's journeys to the region under Kráľová hoľa, her effort to learn how to sew a cap that is part of the traditional attire of married women there, combined with the realization that contemporary Slovak countryside is not only far removed from the folkloric image but is also hardly even Slovak anymore, resulted in a work that is profoundly personal, captivating, and probing sensitive areas of society, nation, history, and the present, including personal and deeply intimate issues. The extraordinary quality of this prose earned it the Art Award from the Tatra Bank Foundation in the literature category, the Literary Academy Award for book distribution Panta Rhei, the title of Book of the Year in the annual poll of the Pravda newspaper, and it brought her to the final five – the short-list…