Authors
Magdaléna PLATZOVÁ
Novelist and journalist Magdaléna Platzová was born on March 8th 1972 in Prague. After finishing secondary school she was awarded a stipendium at America’s Georgetown University and at the Brockwood Park School in England, where she studied philosophy, anthropology, literature, languages and art; from 1992-98 she studied philosophy at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague. Since 1994 she has worked as an assistant to Petr Lébl, director of the Na Zábradlí Theatre, then later as an actor for the Czech-French company at the Na Voru Theatre and then as editor of the Literání noviny (the Literary Review); at the moment she is working for the weekly magazine Respekt. She lives in Prague.
From the beginning the artistic ambitions of Magdaléna Platzová have been divided into three areas: drama, journalism and literature. As a dramatist she found immediate success with her first attempt Na útěku! (On the Run!), for which in 1999 she was nominated the Alfred Radok Prize for the best Czech and Slovak Theatre Play. There then followed Sayang (which was also nominated for this award and received a public reading at the Na Zábradlí Theatre) and Jiná cesta (A Different Way). She has been a journalist since 2000: she began as a freelance journalist writing for the monthly magazine Xantyp and for the daily newspaper Právo’s cultural supplement Salon; from 2001-2004 she worked as the literary editor and later as the editor-in-chief of the weekly Literární noviny; since January 2008 she has been the cultural editor of the weekly magazine Respekt. The third area is literature. Platzová’s debut was a collection of four loosely connected stories inspired by Dalmatia and entitled Sůl, ovce a kamení [Salt, Sheep and Stone]. Published in 2003, we can see here the author’s attempts to show how general events can impinge upon an individual character’s ability to act in any given moment. A year later Platzová brought out her autobiographical novel Návrat přítelkyně [The Return of the Friend]: the main character, 19-year-old Magdaléna, is about to set out on a “journey of discovery”, where the world of her first loves and all manner of physical and intellectual “temptations” open up in front of her, covering a wide range of joys and disappointments. The undisguised personal level of narration in Návratu přítelkyně makes it Platzová’s most spontaneous work to date. In 2006 the author published what has been her last novel to date, Aaronův skok [Aaron’s Leap], which was inspired in part by the life of the Austrian painter Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, and in part by the “turbulent” twentieth century. The wide-ranging themes, multiple contextual details, general philosophical reflections and variations in the femininity of different characters force the author into a certain simplification of historical events and psychological viewpoints. In the stories of the three women, who are separated by three generations, Platzová brilliantly outlines the tension between the real experiences from events of the time with the characters’ more intimate concerns – and thus their perceptions, interpretations and ulterior motives. The paths of the two older women (the grandmother Kristýna and her Jewish friend, the painter Berta) had dramatically crossed in the past, but it’s the younger Milena who has, as they say, “her whole life in front of her”, who collects the fragments of their lives in an effort to make them understandable in their entirety. Magdaléna Platzová is preparing a new novel for publication, Recyklovaný muž [The Recycled Man].
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Translated by Graeme Dibble.
The author’s profile was last updated on March 1st 2008
Deutsch 
Magdaléna PLATZOVÁ, Deutsch.doc
En français Magdaléna PLATZOVÁ, En français.doc
