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Magdaléna Platzová Czech Republic    PWF 2017

“Perhaps at some point you have to exile yourself, to be out there all by yourself.”

For Magdaléna Platzová the French city of Lyon—where Philip Kaufman filmed Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being—is the perfect place of exile. Its outer resemblance to Prague makes the feelings of isolation even more poignant. Her characters move across continents—but there is always the question of home. “What does that word exactly mean? Is it a real place? Or is it only our desire for something that can never be?”

Born in Prague in 1972, Magdaléna Platzová gained early recognition for her fiction, becoming a prominent figure of her generation, while working as an editor in the journals of Literární noviny and Respekt.

“Space is the key” in Platzová’s latest novel The Attempt, which focuses on the legacy of radical politics and movements such as Occupy Wall Street. “A place where people can stay, day after day, night after night, sleeping, thinking, eating, creating something. A place that can’t be erased with a click of a mouse, that can last as a source of irritation even after it’s all over.”  

The author of seven collections—including Aaron’s Leap, and The Other Side of Silence, awaiting publication—Magdaléna Platzová resides in Lyon.