Tomáš Přidal: In the forest I stepped over a root…

Born in 1968 in Brno. A poet, prose writer, illustrator, and musician. He studied Czech language and art education at Masaryk University in Brno and works as a secondary school teacher. He made his debut in 1996 with the collection Všechno má barvu mýdla (Everything Has the Colour of Soap, 1996), followed by seven other books, most recently Čalouník (The Upholsterer, 2019), in which nonsense, imagination, playfulness, and dreaming are closely linked in a spirit of camaraderie. “In the forest, I stepped over a root, and since then I have looked at things this way. I stopped separating the reality within imagination from the reality of the real world. Sometimes it is even possible to live the poems of other authors. For example, I take a tram to a club—it moves slowly and creaks terribly, as if it were about to fall apart,” he said in an interview for the website iLiteratura.cz.