Franz Kafka Prize in the context of Prague, Czech Republic

Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian novelist, poet, literary critic, and inventor. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of nonfiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Her best-known work is the 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Prince of Asturias Award for literature, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television.

Atwood's works encompass a variety of themes including gender and identity, religion and myth, the power of language, climate change, and power politics. Many of her poems are inspired by myths and fairy tales which interested her from a very early age.

Philip Milton Roth (/rɒθ/; March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.

Roth was one of the most honored American writers of his generation. He received the National Book Critics Circle award for The Counterlife, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman, a second National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater, and the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 2001, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize in Prague. In 2005, the Library of America began publishing his complete works, making him the second author so anthologized while still living, after Eudora Welty. Harold Bloom named him one of the four greatest American novelists of his day, along with Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. James Wood wrote: "More than any other post-war American writer, Roth wrote the self—the self was examined, cajoled, lampooned, fictionalized, ghosted, exalted, disgraced but above all constituted by and in writing. Maybe you have to go back to the very different Henry James to find an American novelist so purely a bundle of words, so restlessly and absolutely committed to the investigation and construction of life through language... He would not cease from exploration; he could not cease, and the varieties of fiction existed for him to explore the varieties of experience".

The Franz Kafka Society (Czech: Společnost Franze Kafky; German: Franz-Kafka-Gesellschaft) was a non-profit organisation established in 1990 to celebrate the heritage of German Language literature in Prague. The society was co-sponsor the annual Franz Kafka Prize. Membership stood at around 1000 people globally, including Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass.The former president of the society was Vladimír Železný.

Among the stated goals of the organisation was to foster cultural pluarity among the Czech, German and Jewish people of Central Europe. It also aimed to translate the entire work of Franz Kafka into Czech.