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Sylvie Richterová Czech Republic    PWF 1995

Besides writing poetry, prose and essays she is also a skilled interpreter (French and Russian). Since 1971, she has been living in Italy, where she worked as a Czech language teacher, later becoming a professor of Czech language and literature at universities in Padua and Viterbo. At present, she is lecturing at a university in Rome.

She started writing fiction in 1970s and published her books in samizdat and later abroad. She was not allowed to publish officially in her native country until the 1990s.

Richterová, together with Věra Linhartová and Daniela Hodrová, belongs to the contemporary Czech authors of experimental books exploiting uncommon narrative techniques.

Her prose, fragmentary and full of reminiscences, resembles diaries, e.g. in Rozptýlené podoby and Druhé loučení. Her lyrical writings are collected in the books of poetry Neviditelné jistoty (1994) and Čas věčnost (2003).

One the most remarkable works of Sylvie Richterová is her trilogy of theoretical studies on literature, Slova a ticho, Ticho a smích, Místo domova, where she analyzes writings of several Czech poets and novelists (V. Linhartová, M. Kundera, J. Hašek, L. Vaculík, J. Skácel či J. Kolář). The subjects of these studies include home and exile, ideology and memory, ethics and aesthetics, centre and periphery.