Born 20th October 1964 in Český Brod. After graduating from high school, she studied at what was then the faculty of journalism of Charles University in Prague and first worked on the weekly magazine Květy. From 1989 she began to work for Lidové noviny, initially as a reporter for the domestic section of the newspaper. In 1992 she was sent to the Russian Federation as a foreign correspondent and eventually became a war correspondent from the Caucasus. In 1994 together with Jaromír Štětina she founded the private news agency Epicentrum. For a while she acted as a humanitarian worker in Grozny in Chechnya. The year after that she co-founded the civic association Berkat for the support of children and women in Chechnya and Afghanistan (where she has acted as a correspondent in recent years) and for refugees living in the Czech Republic. In 1997 she was awarded the journalistic Ferdinand Peroutka Prize, and in 2000 the President of the Czech Republic presented her with a Medal of Merit.
The focus of Petra Procházková’s literary activity lies primarily in her journalism, particularly reportage work, in which she has borne witness to conflicts in the former republics of the Soviet Union and in the modern autonomous republics of the Russian Federation. However, she has also written about the situation in Kurdistan and about guerilla fighters in East Timor. If, however, her principal journalistic genre is reportage, that is informative articles based on reporting techniques and looking at real events, in her fictional books Procházková tries to adapt her story-telling method. In the publication Aluminiová královna (The Aluminium Queen) she chose the modern journalistic genre of the interview, and in this book assembled selected interviews with Russian and Chechen women, victims of the Russo-Chechen wars of the 1990s – victims who survived –, during which she always focused on so-called ordinary lives rather than prominent individuals, and on the depiction of the radical changes and reversals which occurred in their private lives during the military conflicts that verged on civil war.
Procházková projected her experiences from Afghanistan into the journalistic novel Frišta, in which on the one hand she depicted the state of affairs in the country after the fall of the Taliban, after the elimination of the totalitarian regime of the Talibs, and she illustrates this situation using the example of the life story of her heroine – half-Russian, half-Tajik, married to an Afghanistan stricken by years of war. In her private life and in her philosophy this woman tries to somehow fit together the value parameters of so-called eastern culture with social and psychological stimuli from western civilization, boosting human self-confidence and widening the horizons of potential participation in society. It is this overcoming of significant differences in the present-day value hierarchy of both these distant cultures that eventually becomes the central theme of this author’s journalistic fictional story-telling, which is based partly on a detailed knowledge of the social thinking in the given locality, partly on an exceptional sense for the mentality of the people living in this long-suffering transcaucasian region. In her documentary prose work Frišta, Procházková above all presents several possible conceptions of human fate and of a subjective coming to terms with its twists and turns.
(vn)
This profile was last updated on 1. 1. 2010
