A Czech student’s evocative account of a party in London on the night of the EU referendum and what it might mean for her future has won the British Czech & Slovak Association’s most recent writing competition. The first prize of £300 was awarded for Ms Bernhardt’s Brexit, by Jennifer Moore.
Jennifer is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Guardian and Mslexia. She read English Literature at Cambridge University and is a previous winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Competition. She lives in Devon.
The second prize, worth £100, went to The Pig, the Cupboard and the Reichsprotektor, by Jack Mullin. It’s a comic tale, based on a true incident that took place in Bohemia in 1942, in which an clever Czech householder goes to great lengths to prevent his pig being requisitioned by the occupying Germans.
Jack has lived most of his life in Ayrshire, working for the Butlin family and the Rank Organisation. In 1971-72 he moved to Prague, where he married a Czech, Libuse, and worked for a time in a local engineering factory and then at the British Embassy. He has now been retired for 18 years.
The BCSA aims to raise public awareness in Britain of Czech and Slovak life in all its aspects – including history, politics, science, economies, arts and literature. It puts on a series of cultural and social events throughout the year and publishes the quarterly British Czech & Slovak Review, a cultural and political magazine. The competition is for writing about the links between Britain and the lands now comprising the Slovak and Czech Republics, or about society in transition in the Republics since the Velvet Revolution in 1989.
The BCSA will be running the writing competition (its sixteenth) again in 2017. Entry is free. For more information e-mail prize@bcsa.co.uk.
Our picture shows Jennifer Moore and Jack Mullin (right) with the BCSA’s Competition Administrator, Edward Peacock, when they received their prizes at the Association’s Annual Dinner in London recently.
