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Iva Pekárková Czech Republic    PWF 2018

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Taxi-driving novelist Iva Pekárková was born in 1963 in Prague, studied microbiology and virology at Charles University, then defected to Austria in 1985, and immigrated to the United States after spending a year in a refugee camp.

Just like every proper American writer, Iva Pekárková held numerous lousy jobs: social worker in the South Bronx, barmaid, and driver of the official New York Yellow Cab among them. She writes openly about sexuality, which makes her controversial in her native country, especially as her novels are written in Czech.

After the Velvet Revolution, Pekárková returned briefly to Prague. Since 2006, she lives in London where she drove the not-so-official London minicab and occasionally works as a face-to-face interpreter.

The author of numerous novels, travelogues, story collections, and books of blogs, Iva Pekárková’s novel Truck Stop Rainbows was first published by the exile publishing house 68 Publishers in Toronto in 1989. Her works include: The World is Round, Gimme the Money, To India Where Else, Six Billion Americas, Concrete, and the “black-and-white animal trilogy” Elephants in the Dusk, The She-Leopard, and The Roast Zebra.