Authors

For many years, together with her husband Pavel Tichý (1936–94), she worked at the University of Otago in the harbour city of Dunedin. For over thirty years she lectured in philosophy and political science. She now lives on New Zealand’s South Island. 

The Czech-New Zealand writer Jindra Tichá debuted with her short stories at the end of the 1980s through 68-Publishers, the exile publishing house run by Josef Škvorecký and his wife. She did not establish herself as a successful writer in the Czech arena until after 1989; ten of her books have already been published here, with the eleventh, entitled Incest, being prepared for publication by the Prague publishing house Akropolis, which has become her regular publisher. Two basic strands are particularly evident in Jindra Tichá’s literary works. The first of these is closely connected with the author’s native land, and therefore with a sense of the loss of a homeland and the practical impossibility of returning years later and re-establishing broken relationships. The main characters in the majority of her books are emigrants who are coming to terms with the consequences of the physical departure from their country and subsequently, after their return, with disillusion and another loss – this time of a feeling of solidarity and understanding. The second significant aspect of Jindra Tichá’s books is globetrotting: although this may have been necessitated or kick-started by emigration, travel and reflections on the regions visited are among the central themes of the exotic travelogue Jak krmit bohy (about encounters with unusual religious groups), and also of the book of reportage and essays from the South Pacific entitled Pacific Letters (which originally, from 1999–2001, was published in instalments in the magazine Tvar), as well as the collection of notes from a lecture visit of several years in the USA which forms the travelogue Amerika, jak ji Kolumbus neznal (in which the author “introduces modern-day America and its everyday life, uncovers the roots of the relationships between its black and white inhabitants, and visits places which represent milestones in the history of the country”). The latest of Tichá’s books, Přirozená linie ženského těla, neatly combines personal memoirs with a family chronicle. A heightened awareness of the finite nature of human life is the trigger for the story: because of this, although the author again reflects ordinary history, this time she concretizes individual moments with examples from the experiences of her ancestors. Through reminiscences and surviving documents there emerges from the past something akin to a detective story, which tracks the will and capabilities of the female members of the author’s family, whose characteristics include an urge for discovery as well as a slight inclination towards emancipation, or indeed feminism. For that matter, this is another fundamental theme of the heroines of the author’s books, whether it concerns the travel saga of a mother and daughter in the book Cena porážky, or the love story of a couple who meet again after a separation of thirty-six years (in the text Dospělí milenci nemlčí). Jindra Tichá devoted the book Jak se investuje do nemovitostí na Novém Zélandu to her new homeland, in which she has been living since September 1970. In this work she describes not only the exotic landscape, but especially its inhabitants, of whom she speaks with admiration and appreciation. In a series of stories based on reality she offers a detailed look at business psychology and at the same time “captures the rebirth of the poor emigrant from a socialist country who arrived with two pieces of luggage and without a penny in his pocket”. Jindra Tichá is a writer, a philosophizing observer and also an active participant in events. Her records and tales draw on her closest family circle as well as general historical formats. She connects the world of objective and subjective events sensitively and with an understanding of the necessary co-existence of large-scale (world) and small-scale (personal) histories.

Publishing house

Akropolis, www.akropolis.info