Michal Viewegh is one of the most popular contemporary Czech writers

Czech literature

Czech literature is the literature written by Czechs or other inhabitants of the Czech state, mostly in the Czech language, although other languages like Old Church Slavonic, Latin or German have been also used, especially in the past. Modern authors from the Czech territory who wrote in other...

 and the bestselling one. He writes about romantic relationships of his contemporaries with humour, and variously successful irony and attempts at deeper meaningfulness; he is sometimes compared to Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby is an English novelist, essayist and screenwriter. He is best known for the novels High Fidelity, About a Boy, and for the football memoir Fever Pitch. His work frequently touches upon music, sport, and the aimless and obsessive natures of his protagonists.-Life and career:Hornby was...

 by his fans.

His books, which, since the late 1990s, he publishes every spring, usually sell about 50,000 copies each, bringing him an upper-high-class income unparalleled among Czech writers (by his own boastful admissions, his royalties from a successful book are equal to roughly 8 years of an average Czech salary

Economy of the Czech Republic

Of the emerging democracies in central and eastern Europe, the Czech Republic has one of the most developed industrialized economies. It is one of the most stable and prosperous of the post-Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe...

). His 2004 income was CZK

Czech koruna

The Czech koruna or Czech crown has been the currency of the Czech Republic since 8 February 1993 when, together with its Slovak counterpart, it replaced the Czechoslovak koruna at par....

 four million. Viewegh likes to point out this success with readers, as well as the fact that his books have been translated to several languages and made into films, since he fell out of favor with critic

Critic

A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...

s in mid-1990s, which sentiment he heartily reciprocated in his following books.