Authors
Hana ANDRONIKOVA
Fiction writer Hana Andronikova was born in Zlín on 9 September 1967. She read English and Czech at Prague, and, after graduating, worked as a personnel manager for both Czech and international companies. She left the entrepreneurial sphere in 1999 and devoted herself exclusively to writing. Hana Andronikova died December 18, 2011.
The need for a profound examination of the female identity is typical of the writing of Hana Andronikova. She proceeds by setting out to know her ancestral roots, by identifying the genius loci of her native land, and also by portraying and comprehending the human ability to cope with extreme tasks and situations. The author’s testimony is in this sense an emotional one, sparing neither herself nor the society of which she is a part and which has allowed itself to be changed into an inscrutable teatrum mundi. Yet her fiction cannot be said to suffer from a feeling of defeatism. On the contrary – she glorifies the inner strength that her heroines successfully mobilize in various situations and their ability to inspire those around them with the power of their personal magnetism. In her debut novel Zvuk slunečních hodin (The Sound of Sun Dials) we are taken in retrospect through a model mosaic of female destinies shaped by the twentieth century: from pre-1939 Czechoslovakia, which provides a backdrop for a young couple’s love affair, through reflections of the traumatizing experiences of the Shoah and the ensuing show trials of the Communist era, to the cathartic experience of the revolutionary changes beginning in November 1989. The phenomenon of time plays a significant role for Andronikova. Time here is not a thematic element, but an architectural one: the writer has composed the novel as a set of plot fields with returning motives, whose alternation, however irregular, is brought together in a narrative circle. After opening one chamber, the reader enters additional rooms where the tour of the narrative proceeds quite unsystematically, as fractured as the process of human thinking or remembering. And yet her careful construction of the plot enables the reader confidently to identify the disappearing and reappearing characters, places and events, not least because Andronikova is a dynamic storyteller. She creates an almost cinematic image, where sequences of events and situations alternate in rapid succession. She does not, however, stop at hints, sketchiness or the superficiality of narrative observation; unafraid of detail, she maximizes the image. She is as capable of constructing a dramatic dialogue as she is of developing a rich line of monologue which conveys the bitterness and misery of life as well as its beauty. In the way she puts it, even the descriptions of places, situations and psychological states pulsate with dramatic tension. She tends to write in short, even terse sentences, as in her collection of short stories Srdce na udici (Heart on a Hook), which treats the ‘minor major’ dramas of the modern individual from the viewpoints of different narrators – male and female, young and elderly. In these stories, Andronikova’s prose techniques are enhanced by the process of mirroring: the texts permeate and complement each other and the characters pass on the narrative voice to each other from one story to the next.
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The profile was updated in 2005
Deutsch 
Hana ANDRONIKOVÁ, Deutsch.doc
En français Hana ANDRONIKOVÁ, En français.doc
