Pavla Horáková

Pavla Horáková (b. 1974) is a Prague-based author, radio journalist and literary translator. She has received two translation awards, having translated over 20 books from English and Serbian, such as novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow and Iain Banks. Her published works of fiction include a detective trilogy for young adults: The Secret of the Sexton Beetles (2010, 2016), The Sexton Beetles under the Castle (2011, 2016) and The Sexton Beetles and the Gravediggers (2012, 2018). In 2018, she co-authored the novella Johana (alongside Alena Scheinostová and Zuzana Dostálová) and published her first novel for adults, A Theory of Strangeness (Teorie podivnosti, 2018). She was awarded the most prestigious literary award in Czechia (Magnesia Litera). She has been working as a reporter for Czech Radio since 2001. With her co-host Jiří Kamen wrote and presented a twenty-seven part series titled Field Post (2015) highlighting the memoirs, journals and correspondence of Czech soldiers for the centenary of WW1. The pair also edited two books on that subject, entitled An Order Came Through from the Emperor (2015) and Zum Befehl, Lieutenant, Sir (2018). Rights to her winning novel A Theory of Strangeness have been sold to 12 countries so far.

THE MOST PRESTIGIOUS LITERARY AWARD – BEST WORK OF FICTION (2019)

Looking to the West

March 2025, 256 pages

Available material: English summary

Pavla Horáková’s new novel delves into the decay of communist Czechoslovakia of the 1980

David and Marta, classmates in a Prague housing estate, long for Western consumer goods above all else. In Prague, opportunities seem abundant, and the Iron Curtain appears far more permeable than it does up close. Husák’s Children navigate the world of obsolete ideology with ease, learning the art of discrete collaboration from their parents and teachers.

No one suspects that the era of the normalization limbo has reached its final months. Or do they? Is Marta’s parents’ last-minute emigration mere misfortune, or a calculated escape from an impending reckoning?

A decade later, Marta and David cross paths again at the close of the pioneering 1990s. But will they seek another reunion now in their fifties, when the characters forged in their socialist childhoods have fully crystallized?

Told through the eyes of teenagers, the novel explores the final years of the 1980s in Prague, revealing that snobbery, materialism, consumerism, cronyism, and nepotism—often attributed to capitalism—had been deeply rooted in Czech society long before November 1989.