“Sales leaders” or “prize-winning books”: tastes and preferences of the Slovak reader

Abstract

The book market in Slovakia is very rich and diverse; it presents works of various genres and themes, aimed at readers with a variety of tastes. The article discusses approaches to the evaluation of literary products, on the one hand, from the point of view of the reading public, and, on the other hand, the members of the juries of a number of literary prizes awarded annually in the country. The largest Slovak publishing houses and bookstores conduct monitoring, constantly updating their data on the best-selling books. Among the bestsellers are, as a rule, works of popular genres, including detective stories, women’s novels, political thrillers, novels with elements of mysticism. Other criteria are put forward by the jury of prestigious literary competitions, first of all, the Anasoft Litera Award for the best original prose literary work in the Slovak language. In more detail, the article discusses the books of the winners in the recent years. These are Ondrej Štefánik (the novel “I am Paula”, 2016), Ivan Medeši (the collection of short stories “Eating”, 2018), Jana Sabuchová (the novel “Whisperers”, 2019). Etela Farkašová’s novel “The Script” (2017), due to its high artistic merits and humanistic orientation, was a great success with both critics and readers.