In Prose Of Prague

I like a lot of things about the Czech Republic. They brew the best beer in the world and cultivate traffic-free spa towns where you can go to die in peace while being massaged by curative waters and 25-stone women. Novelists such as Kundera, Klima and Skvorecky produce books combining melancholy philosophies and impossibly beautiful girls narrated by the kind of self-aware sufferers all writers would quite like to be. I will be cheering their team on during Euro 2004. And the Prague-based publisher BB Art recently purchased the rights to my book, meaning that if they bother translating it and printing it, I will be able to say I've been published somewhere else besides the UK. Or, as my Mum might put it if she was telling her friends, I will become "an international, bi-lingually published author".