Join us for a Cheuse Salon at The Writer’s Center to celebrate the launching of Czech author Hana Andronikova’s final novel, Heaven Has No Ground. Managing Editor at Plamen Press, Rachel Miranda, and the novel’s translator, Roman Kostovski, will discuss making Heaven Has No Ground’s English-language edition. Rachel Miranda has done extensive research on Hana Andronikova, including traveling to Prague and interviewing close the author’s friends and relatives. Kostovski will discuss the trials and challenges of translating and preserving Andronikova’s unique writing style. The evening will be moderated by Amy Freeman, Development Director at The Writer’s Center.
Heaven Has No Ground is the fierce, intimate story of Ama, a young woman who is reckoning with the death of her father when she receives her own cancer diagnosis and, contrary to the wishes of family and friends, decides to seek alternative treatments rather than conventional chemotherapy and radiation. While this book was published as a work of fiction to great acclaim in the Czech Republic, it follows very closely the life story of its author, Hana Andronikova, who wrote the book during a period of optimism in her own battle with breast cancer. Much like Hana, Ama travels the world to find guidance and healing—going to Peru to consult a shaman and receive the Amazon’s wisdom; to communities of Christian believers and Native Americans in the Nevada desert; and to the holy sites of Israel. Using striking metaphors and intensely emotional language in journal entries, emails, and narrative fragments, Andronikova takes us with her on a remarkable journey as she comes to grips with her human limitations and celebrates her place in the circle of life.
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.
Rachel Miranda was born in Zurich, Switzerland and immigrated to the US at the age of eight. She holds an MFA in Writing and Literature at the Bennington Writing Seminars, and a BA in European Cultural Studies from Brandeis University. In addition to her work for Plamen Press, she is a freelance editor of literary, cultural, and scholarly works ranging from historical retrospectives and memoirs to poetry, novels, and plays, specializing in non-native English and developmental editing. Her own published works include short stories, essays, poems, and The World at Our Table: A Euro-American Cookbook of Family Favorites. She is currently working on a novel about the immigrant experience.
Roman Kostovski was born in Prague, in 1968. He has a B.A. from the College of William and Mary and an M.A. from the University of Maryland. He studied Czech language and literature at Charles University in Prague as a post-graduate. He has taught Czech at George Washington University and worked as a Central and Southeastern European research analyst at Georgetown University. He translates poetry and prose from Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Slovak into English. His writings and translations have appeared in numerous journals, including Absinthe-New European Writings and Watchword Press and the Poet Lore. His book translations include Arnost Lustig’s Fire on Water (Northwestern University Press, 2006), Viktor Dyk’s The Ratcatcher (Plamen Press, 2014), Vitězslav Nezval’s Farewell and a Handkerchief-Poems from the Road (Plamen Press, 2020). He received an NEA Translation Fellowship Award in 2017. He founded Plamen Press in 2014, a print-on-demand publishing house for the promotion of literature from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. He works and resides in the Washington, D.C. area.
With years of experience raising funds for nonprofits large and small, Amy Freeman brings her trademark zest to growing The Writer’s Center’s vibrant literary community. When not at TWC, Amy’s a freelance writer, with bylines in The Washington Post, Parents.com, Santa Fe Writing Project, HuffPost, Furious Gravity anthology, etc.
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