Authors
Věra NOSKOVÁ
The writer and journalist Věra Nosková was born in Hroznětina na Karlovarsku in 1947. She grew up in Strakonice, where she graduated from the College of Education. In 1973 she left her home town and her family. The jobs she had up until 1989 included work as a window dresser, a gatekeeper, an archivist, a confectioner and a teacher in a nursery school.
In the early 1990s she worked as a journalist (Český deník, Hospodářské noviny, Týdeník Rozhlas, Český rozhlas 3–Vltava), particularly in the promotion and defence of science. She is the co-founder and vice-chairwoman of the Czech Skeptics Club Sisyfos and a member of the board of directors of the charity Nadace, which supports the education of gifted children from the Peruvian Andes through distance “adoption”. Since 2003 Věra Nosková has owned her own publishing house. She lives in Prague.
Nosková set up her own publishing house in 2003. As well as the work of other authors, she has published a collection of her own short stories and essays entitled Je to hustý [It’s Cool], the second edition of which came out in expanded form in 2006 with the title Ať si holky popláčou [Let the Girls Cry]. Věra Nosková’s popularity is evident in the fact that her novel Bereme, co je [We’ll Take What There Is], which was published first in 2004 and then again in 2005, was nominated for the Magnesia Litera prize. The way in which Nosková manages to reflect in her novel the world and events at the turn of the 1960s - the period of her childhood - is understated, incisive and, through a child’s naivety, also comical. The story, which traces the hardships endured during adolescence as well as recording small-town normalization “mistakes”, modern “dance” and “grand circles”, drips with sarcasm and a subtly tragicomic description of the situation. The “Sceptic Sprite”, the sceptical presence within the author’s mind and within the outlook of a generation, provides the strongest moments of the book, which can be ranked alongside Irena Dousková, Petr Šabach and early Michal Viewegh. Nosková also employs the device of having the main hero grow up during the dark, grey period of Czechoslovak socialism in the 1970s. Věra Nosková’s works up until now have been thematically restricted and concentrate on her own personal experiences: “I have lived through all the stories in the book,” says the writer. Childhood and adolescent memories, moving from job to job, fulfilling a dream to move to Prague, family and professional life, and conflicts of opinion with proponents of esoteric and other peculiar pseudosciences form an unusual mix which the author delivers with a healthy dispassion and a distinctive, keen and sometimes caustic irony. Everything is rooted in a reality which gradually moves into the background to make way for strict moral judgments. The different types of situations and the wealth of experiences now seem to have been exhausted. The follow-up to Bereme, co je is to be published in 2007 under the title Obsazeno (Occupied), in which the author promises a detailed description of her experiences during the period of normalization, and where it is hoped that the writer will find new sources of inspiration.
En français 
Věra NOSKOVÁ
