Authors
Roman LUDVA
Fiction writer and columnist Roman Ludva was born in Ústí nad Orlicí on 10 July 1966. He spent his childhood in Ústí nad Orlicí, from where the family moved to Olomouc. After technical school in Olomouc, he studied engineering at Brno but did not complete his degree. Instead, he found employment as a manual labourer and technician. After the Changes of late 1989, he was a repertory adviser in Divadlo hudby (The Music Theatre) in Olomouc. He was later active as an editor, both at the local radio and at the Votobia publishing house. In 1999 he began working as a freelance writer. He lives in Olomouc. He has also written screenplays for the detective series Velázquezovy dívky (Velázquez’s Girls) and the feature film Cukrový vrch (Sugar Mountain), both produced for television, and the radio play Modrý bar (The Blue Bar). He also writes for the Music Theatre, Olomouc.
A sense of mystery, enhanced by the symbolism of colour, numbers and light, forms the cornerstone of Roman Ludva’s fiction. It is intensified by well-placed motifs, some of which he uses to link together his separate volumes. Given the absence of a conclusive point and the hoped-for solution in his work, it’s clear that the process of revealing the mystery is more important for Ludva than the mystery itself (if any exists). He tends to use the final chapters of his novels to expose the moment of vain expectations. With the exception of Smrt a křeslo (Death and the Armchair), whose protagonist Ondřej Vlk accepts a temporary position as a librarian in a small town at the foot of a mountain, Ludva’s novels are always set in places both geographically and socially alien to the ordinary reader, and even his protagonists are people with exceptional occupations (a Parisian film producer, a hired-killer living in Iceland, a world-renowned painter of Czech origin). His characterization is largely developed using his characters’ professional and personal interests, which are the key for what motivates their actions. The author takes more or less one-off excursions into various artistic and scientific fields (architecture, film, meteorology, puzzle-solving, painting), and then skilfully incorporates such passages into his storytelling. The linear plot-line of the two earlier works are introduced by the author as narrator: in his second novel, Žena sedmi klíčů (The Woman of Seven Keys), he introduces the storyline in the form of a fictional letter that has supposedly inspired the author to write his book. The two later novels, by contrast, have more tightly composed narratives: Jezdci pod slunečníkem (Riders under a Parasol) alternates chapters of two disparate temporal and narrative planes – the confession of the hired killer Petr Benolol written in the form of a year of diary entries and the police search for the culprit – bringing them together in the final chapters of the book; the volume Stěna srdce (Wall of the Heart) revolves around a sketchy plot involving the Czech painter Josef Hala and the writer Patrik Honzl to whom Hala tells the story of his life. In these novels, the author continues to develop his ideas about literature and art, to reflect on and defend his writing. Ludva’s novels meet the best standards of intellectualized popular literature by developing complex storylines, employing the form of a modern detective novel, mediated by a narrator familiar with his themes and his readers.
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E-mail: roman.ludva@tiscali.cz
Deutsch 
Roman LUDVA, Deutsch.doc
En français Roman LUDVA, En français.doc
