Hana Andronikova

Born in Zlín, Czech Republic, in 1967, Hana Andronikova studied English and Czech literature at Charles University in Prague. After a detour into the corporate world, she turned to fiction writing and won instant acclaim for her first novel, The Sound of the Sundial , receiving the Magnesia Litera Award for Best New Discovery in 2002. Her book of short stories, Heart on a Hook , cemented her national literary reputation; she was particularly noted for her use of time as a structural element. In...See more

Born in Zlín, Czech Republic, in 1967, Hana Andronikova studied English and Czech literature at Charles University in Prague. After a detour into the corporate world, she turned to fiction writing and won instant acclaim for her first novel, The Sound of the Sundial , receiving the Magnesia Litera Award for Best New Discovery in 2002. Her book of short stories, Heart on a Hook , cemented her national literary reputation; she was particularly noted for her use of time as a structural element. In 2007, she was sponsored by the U.S. State Department to attend the International Writing Program at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after her return home, and Heaven Has No Ground , though presented as a work of fiction, is a personal chronicle of her fight with the illness. For this work, she won the Magnesia Litera again in 2011, but lost the battle for her life at the end of that year. She was 44 years old. See less