Heaven Has No Ground - Paperback

by Hana Andronikova (Author), Roman Kostovski (Translator)

Hana Andronikova's second, and unfortunately last novel, was published nine years after the success of her first book The Sound of the Sundial. Andronikova herself admitted that in Heaven Has No Ground, the character of Ama, a self-proclaimed "bio-gal" and "alter-nativist" is somewhat autobiographical as she tries come to terms with the death of her father and with her own cruel diagnosis of breast cancer. Through this intimate story Ama records her battle with the terrible disease. But it is not one that takes place in a hospital bed, but rather on journey with a backpack that leads to the shamans of the Amazon jungle in Peru, to the native Americans of the Nevada Desert, and then finally to the Middle East. Andronikova doesn't shy way from expressing that feeling of raw anxiety upon her return home when she ultimately faces the decision to accept modern medical treatment or not. But the book is much more than a young woman's battle with cancer, it is a witty and colorful narrative of searching for oneself and accepting one's fate. Andronikova does this with a unique style filled with raspy metaphors, a melody of language, and with an a associative string of playful words that borders surrealism.

Author Biography

Hana Andronikova was born in Zlín, Czech Republic in 1967, and studied English and Czech literature at Charles University in Prague. She turned to writing full time after many years of working in the corporate financial sector, and won instant acclaim for her first novel, The Sound of the Sundial (Knizní klub, 2001) receiving the Czech Book Club Literary Award and the Magnesia Litera Award for Best New Discovery in 2002. Her book of short stories, Heart on a Hook (Petrov, 2002), cemented her national literary reputation, and in 2007 she was sponsored by the U.S. State Department to attend the International Writing Program at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop. She was particularly noted for her use of time as a structural element in the narrative, and her skill at conveying intimate and dramatic moments using terse sentences and fragments. She was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after her return home. Her book Heaven Has No Floor (Odeon, 2010) is a personal chronicle of her fight with illness and the looming possibility of death. For this work she won the Magnesia Litera again in 2011, but lost the battle for her life at the end of that same year. She was 44 years old.

Roman Kostovski has a B.A. in Russian Language and International Relations from the College of William and Mary, and an M.A. in Russian Language and Linguistics from the University of Maryland. He also holds a Lecturer of Czech Certification from Charles University in Prague, and has taught Czech at George Washington University. He translates poetry and prose into English from Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Slovak. His translations have appeared in numerous journals, including Absinthe-New European Writings and Watchword Press. His translation of Arnost Lustig's Porgess was published by Northwestern University Press in 2006, and his translation of Viktor Dyk's Czech classic The Ratcatcher was published by Plamen Press in 2014. He has also translated the poetry of Karel Kryl and Jaromir Nohavica in an album collection of songs titled Steel Strings and Iron Curtains (Plamen Press, 2019). In 2017, he was awarded a National Endowments of the Arts Literary Translation Fellowship.