Poet, writer and journalist Svatava Antošová was born on 3 June 1957 in Teplice. She graduated from grammar school and the School of Librarian Studies. After this she took many jobs, both manual and intellectual (such as an enamelling factory and on the staff of Cosmopolitan). Her last was as a librarian in the Municipal Library in Teplice. Antošová has been a freelance writer since 2005. Since 2008, she has also been on the staff of the literary magazine Tvar. She still lives in Teplice.
For Svatava Antošová, literature has always represented an escape from reality, a private revolt against today's moral standards and scale of values, a personal yet strong opposition to the mechanisms of power which suppresses individual identity and uniqueness. "Poetry has always worked for me. It has taken me beyond the limits of this world, beyond its narrow-mindedness, vanity and superficiality. And it has allowed for one more thing. It helped me create a world of my own. The one I live in has never been enough." Originally, Antošová was inspired by the tradition of the avant-garde, namely pataphysics which reflects on this world as an infinite, ever returning series of absurd actions and also by the beatniks, by the literary underground and by rock poetry. She concentrated on the subversion of the spiritual. Her free verse texts from the 1980s took the audience on a journey full of liberated visions, hallucinations and streams of metaphors and images which were often very open, shocking, vulgar and banal (The Calendar of the Sixth Sense – Kalendář šestého smyslu; They Call Me Poetry – Říkají mi poezie, The Woman Must Be Drunk – Ta ženská musí být opilá). The literary critic Vladimír Novotný comments on her work: "The anti-illusoriness of the poetic gesture does not contribute to the negation of everything. On the contrary, it aims to find the universal values of individual life. Antošová develops this concept especially in her collections of poems Torana (Tórana) and ...Without Cutting with Her Head (...aniž ťala hlavou) where she aims to identify universal aesthetic connotations of the position of the individual in the modern world. She creates her poetic monologues as philosophical meditations on the world of today." After ten years of silence, in 2004 Antošová published her debut novel The Lady and the Jump Rope (Dáma a švihadlo). The additional title of the book is a "lesbian-killer parody with some elements of autobiography" and it has a double meaning: it symbolizes carnality, a particular, palpable "meat", but also Antošová's own life experience. In the dynamic narrative which shifts time frames and includes lyrical passages, the author contrasts homosexuality and her own bohemian nature with a stupefying stereotype of work. Her prose "I Have Never Gone Down on a Nordic Blonde" (Nordickou blondýnu jsem nikdy nelízala)," "grotesque porn from the times of terrorism" published in 2005, follows the same pattern. Antošová comments: "Sex, eroticism, porn – and death: the metaphors through which I could create a world where nobody cares about anything; where everything is only a game of the indistinguishable. Where politics is closely connected with deviation, where killing is sexy and nice and paedophilia is common; and where sex is only one of the many toys, as Paul Virilio writes in his book The Information Bomb." Apart from these two books, which some critics have compared to the works of Emil Hakl (Sabrina Black's Intimate Box – Intimní schránka Sabriny Black) or Petr Zelenka (Tales of Ordinary Madness – Příběhy obyčejného šílenství), Svatava Antošová has published other books of poetry: a collection of thirteen rather long morbid ballads published under the title Don't Kill Me Yet! (Ještě mě nezabíjej! 2005) and a poetic trilogy Wolf's Saliva (Vlčí slina, 2009)
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