The Ministry of Culture Award will be received by Professor Ladislav Lábus

Prof. Ladislav Lábus, laureate of the Ministry of Culture Award for Architecture, and Josef Pleskot, Architect of the Year

Prague - The State Prize for Literature for 2014 will be awarded to linguist, poet, and translator from French Patrik Ouředník and the award for translation to aesthetician and literary theorist Jiří Pechar. Both recipients are honored for their entire body of work so far. The Ministry of Culture Prize for contribution in the field of theater will be awarded to theater historian Adolf Scherl, and in the field of music to musicologist and composer Miloš Štědroň. In the visual arts, the jury selected sculptor Stanislav Kolíbal, and the architecture jury chose Ladislav Lábus.
The laureates were announced today by the Ministry of Culture, and the awards will be presented on Thursday evening at the Trade Fair Palace in a live broadcast on Czech Television. On October 29, awards for contributions in the field of cinematography and audiovisual arts will be presented separately at the Ponrepo cinema, as the evening will also include a screening. The awards went to documentary filmmaker Kristina Vlachová and posthumously to director Věra Chytilová. "The jury felt a great debt that Věra Chytilová had not been awarded earlier, so she received the award in memoriam," said jury chairman Ivan Biel.
For Stanislav Kolíbal, the main argument, according to jury chairman Vít Havránek, is that he is a significant personality who tends to divide opinions. "He has been engaged not only as an artist, where his radicalism brought quality to his work and distinctiveness. His involvement in the National Gallery during Milan Knížák's tenure brought him many debates and condemnations. However, his artistic voice is absolutely undeniable," said Havránek.
The awards are associated with a reward of 300,000 crowns. Some jury chairs pointed out today the low number of nominations in all categories except for literature, which had 32 nominations. In the field of architecture, there was only one candidate, there were 14 nominations for translation, nine nominations each for theater and visual arts, and only seven for music; some names appeared multiple times.
Vít Havránek stated that he would advocate for the appointment of a board of nominators, personalities from the field that could supplement the group of nominees. This is how it works for some awards, such as the Jindřich Chalupecký Award. "In the visual arts, there were significant personalities this year, but there was a lack of a woman. Such discrepancies could be addressed by the mentioned board of nominators," he believes. Jury chairs generally complained about the lack of promotion for these significant awards.