"If you've won a literary award, you can be pretty certain that it was against a book that will live longer than yours." Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham is as humble as he is forthright.

The author of the renowned The Hours was in Prague before Christmas as a guest of the Prague Writers Festival, at which he gave two readings, met the press and signed copies of his books at Big Ben Bookshop. "I can't believe that it's taken me this long to discover Prague," he told a gathering of journalists at the Hotel Josef in Staré Město. "It's the most beautiful city — alive and particular to itself. Prague is utterly Prague."

Cunningham's visit coincided with the recent publication of his latest novel, Specimen Days, in Czech. Flanked by his Czech translators Veronika Volhejnová (who took on Specimen Days' complexities) and Miroslav Jindra (responsible for the Czech version of The Hours), as well as the Prague Writers Festival's maestro, Michael March, Cunningham spoke about his life as a writer. "Writing is my greatest interest," he said. "My estimation of my own skill depends on the day, but the need for ink and paper never leaves me."

The craft of writing is just that to Cunningham, who likens his job to that of a stonemason. "One good definition of a writer is someone who sits in a chair and writes a sentence 45 times until it sounds right," Cunningham said laughing. Certainly, anyone familiar with his work knows that almost all of his sentences do sound right.

A product of the prestigious Iowa Writers program, Cunningham first established a reputation through his short stories, which were published in Atlantic Monthly and the Paris Review. His first novel, A Home at the End of the World, was followed by the two novels that firmly placed him in the forefront of American letters: Flesh and Blood and The Hours.

The film version of The Hours, which earned Nicole Kidman an Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf, obviously helped propel Cunningham's fame in the States and elsewhere. It also has opened up a side career for him as a screenwriter, with a new screenplay on the life of Freddie Mercury and a script — that is to star Kidman — about a woman explorer in the Hollywood pipeline. "It's odd," Cunningham observed. "No one expected the film of The Hours to be a success."

The intricate weaving of three women's stories connected primarily by Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway was a masterful achievement, considering the risk Cunningham ran of hubristically appearing to out-Woolf Woolf. Yet the novel stands as a monument to Woolf's genius and powerful influence on subsequent generations of readers and writers.

At a reading of The Hours in the States some years ago, Cunningham stated that he realized his first attempt at the novel was a "parlor trick," so he tossed a year's worth of writing out and started from scratch, creating a modern classic.

Unfortunately, Cunningham's latest, Specimen Days, which he insisted should be seen as a companion book to the earlier novel, has seemed too much like a parlor trick left unattended for many literary critics.

As Woolf is the guiding spirit of The Hours, in Specimen Days Cunningham strove to sing of Walt Whitman. Again Cunningham has developed a trilogy of stories that are here bound by a single book, Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

The book is certainly experimental. Cunningham chose to craft each tale as a different specimen of genre writing. The first part, "In the Machine," is a 19th-century ghost story, while the second part, "The Children's Crusade," is a piece of modern-day noirish thriller. The last segment, "Like Beauty," is sci-fi.

Although it has been acknowledged by commentators to be filled with some of Cunningham's finest writing, many critics found Specimen Days disjointed, though the first tale, "In the Machine," has often been singled out as a minor masterpiece within a failed book. Indeed, the song "The Other Side" from the recent album by the Scissor Sisters, Ta-Dah, was inspired by the story.

Volhejnová thanked Cunningham for giving her the opportunity to translate Specimen Days (published by Odeon Praha as Vzorové dny). Cunningham responded by saying, "I have a real reverence for the translator's art. I believe that a word-for-word translation would be terrible. Rather, I believe that a work in translation must become a new work. Specimen Days is by Michael Cunningham, but the Czech version becomes a book by Michael Cunningham and Veronika Volhejnová."