Czech poet, dissident, musician and critic, Ivan Martin Jirous has died at 67 years old.

Czech poet, critic, dissident and diplomat Jiří Gruša has died in Germany, where he lived, while undergoing a heart operation. The Prague Post last talked to Gruša in 2009. A transcript of the interview is included below. Gruša was born in Pardubice and later moved to Prague, where he moved in dissident in literary circles. [...]

A roundup of the latest literary stories from around the Internet.

Tomas Transtromer has just been awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature.

A roundup of the most interesting literary news from around the web.

The Prague Post reviewed Simon Garfield’s wonderfully entertaining book on fonts and typefaces, Just My Type, in the Sept. 21 issue. Here, the author spoke with Colophon on the phone from England to discuss his research and what led him into the wonderful world of fonts, an experience that he said inflicted him with “typomania.”

A roundup of the most interesting stories from the world of literature this week.

It would seem that we are in the midst of a second backlash (would that be a back-againlash?) regarding the reputation of the British poet Philip Larkin, whose reputation has swayed from pole to pole since his death in 1985.

Prague Palimpsest is filled with ghostly juxtapositions of memory and place. For its author, Alfred Thomas, Prague is a surface upon which those who pass through have left their trace “without completely effacing the presence of their predecessors.” These may as often be politicians as writers, and the book’s compactly-written chapters do a good job of setting the literature of the city firmly in its historical and political context.

The Syrian poet Adonis, who has been featured in several Colophon posts and articles in The Prague Post, has always been divisive, as a poet, literary scholar and as an outspoken critic against what he sees as a lack of innovation in Arab culture. Adonis has written several editorials and open letters since uprisings occurring throughout the Arab world have also taken hold in Syria. Sinan Antoon has written a scathing response to Adonis’ response to the Arab Spring, saying that the uprisings have rendered Adonis “irrelevant.”