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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.
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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.
Roman Kostovski studied Slavic languages at the College of William and Mary, University of Maryland, and Charles University in Prague. He taught Czech at George Washington University. He translates poetry and prose into English from Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, and Slovak. He has contributed his work to literary journals such as
Poet Lore,
Absinthe-New European Writings, and
Watchword Press. His full-length translations include Arnost Lustig's
Fire on Water (Northwestern University Press; 2006), The Ratcatcher (Plamen Press; 2014), Farewell and a Handkerchief by Vítězslav Nezval (Plamen Press; 2020),
Steel Strings and Iron Curtains (Plamen Press; 2019), an album of songs by Karel Kryl and Jaromír Nohavica. He was awarded the National Endowments of the Arts Literary Translation Fellowship for translating Hana Andronikova's novel
Heaven Has No Ground (Plamen Press; 2023). He founded Plamen Press, an independent non-profit publishing house that promotes literature from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe translated into English.
