Miloš Urban (born 4 October 1967 in Sokolov, Czechoslovakia) is a Czech novelist and horror writer, known as the "dark knight of Czech literature". He is best known for his 1999 novel Sedmikostelí, a Gothic crime horror set in Prague, which was translated into 11 languages. He is also a translator, and has translated works by authors including Isaac Bashevis Singer and Julian Barnes into Czech. He was the winner of the 2002 Magnesia Litera prize for prose writing for his 2001 novel Hastrman, as well as the 1996 Mladá fronta prize for his translation of Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot. As well as the Czech Republic, Urban's books have found considerable commercial success in Spanish-speaking countries. Early life Urban was born in Sokolov in 1967 and grew up in Bohemia. He spent a part of his childhood living in the Czechoslovak embassy in London before moving back to Prague to study Nordic and English Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, which included a year studying abroad at Oxford University. After graduating he worked as an editor for Mladá fronta, then as editor-in-chief for Argo, the publishing house which later released his books. In 1996 Urban won the Mladá fronta Prize for his translation of Flaubert's Parrot by British writer Julian Barnes. Literary career Urban's first novel was The Final Mark on the Manuscripts, released in 1998, a mockumentary novel released under the pseudonym "Josef Urban", also the name of the novel's narrator. The book's plot revolves around the manuscripts of Dvůr Králové and of Zelená Hora. It was positively received and later re-issued by Argo in 2005 under Urban's real name. Later the same year, Urban released his best-known work, The Seven Churches, (), a Gothic historical thriller set in New Town, Prague, about a man named Kvetoslav Svach, and how he is linked to murders in seven cathedrals of the city. It has been acclaimed as a masterpiece of modern gothic literature; Urban was praised as "the dark knight of Czech literature" and the book has been translated into 11 languages (English, German, French, Dutch, Hungarian, Russian, Spanish, Slovene, Croatian, Polish, and Bulgarian). The Seven Churches was the first of a loose trilogy known as the "church trilogy". Hastrman came out in 2001. The novel received the Magnesia Litera Award for prose writing, and has been translated into Hungarian. A film based on the novel was produced