Franz Kafka Prize

Award information and history[edit]

At a presentation held annually in the Old Town Hall (Prague), the recipient receives $10,000, a diploma, and a bronze statuette. Each award is often called the "Kafka Prize" or "Kafka Award".
The award earned some prestige by foreshadowing the Nobel Prize when two of its winners went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year, Elfriede Jelinek (2004) and Harold Pinter (2005).^[1]
The criteria for winning the award include the artwork's "humanistic character and contribution to cultural, national, language and religious tolerance, its existential, timeless character, its generally human validity and its ability to hand over a testimony about our times."^[2]