Petr Král (4 September 1941 – 17 June 2020[1]) was a Czechwriter, initially influenced by surrealism.
Král was born in Prague. Having graduated from FAMU, he worked as an editor in the Orbis publishing house, where he focused on a line of books about film and filmmakers. In 1968, he emigrated to France where he worked in a gallery, a photo shop, as a teacher, interpreter, translator, screenplay author, reviewer and so on. In 1984 he lived in Québec. From 1990 to 1991 he was a cultural counsellor at the Czech embassy in Paris. He translated from and into French (mainly modern poetry). He edited several anthologies. Since April 2006, he resided in Prague.
List of works
Petr Král started writing under the influence of surrealism, but from the 1970s, his books revealed that he felt a lack of fulfilment from the surrealist method. He wrote about eternal longing which is being nourished by itself, and perhaps leads to consuming the person who yearns. Král's emblematic words can be: "We don't die, it's much worse: we vanish. In other words, we never were. There is no reality."[2]
