Petra Hůlová
Petra Hůlová (b .1979) is a fiction writer and the recipient of several literary awards, including the Czechia’s highest literary recognitions – the Magnesia Litera, the Josef Škvorecký Award and the Jiří Orten Award. She studied languages, culture, and anthropology at universities in Prague, Ulan Bator and New York, and was a Fulbright scholar in the USA. Her first novel, All This Belongs to Me (2002), won the Magnesia Litera Award for Discovery of the Year. The English translation by Alex Zucker won the ALTA National Translation Award. Her fourth novel, Plastic Three-bedroom (2006), won the Jiří Orten Prize for the best work of prose or poetry by an author under thirty; Alex Zucker’s English Translation won the PEN Translates Award. Hůlová’s fifth novel, Taiga Station (2008) won the Josef Škvorecký Prize. In total, her novels and two plays of hers have been translated into more than ten languages. Fox Eyes is her first children’s book. Trump Card (2023), an extraordinary novel about culture wars in our everyday life, is her latest novel. She lives in Prague.
LONGLISTED FOR THE TOP CZECH LITERARY AWARD
Trump Card
March 2023, 188 pages
Available material: English synopsis, English sample
Rights sold to: Poland (Afera), USA (World Editions)
Can a woman wake up one day and say #MeToo twenty years later?
Entering her fifties, Sylvie Novak looks back on her successful career as a partisan writer and reflects on her complicated personal life. She revisits memories of an initiatory relationship with an older writer, reevaluating what happened long ago. And then there is the present: touring with her new book of feminist essays, dealing with the signs of ageing, and fighting the Invisible Woman Syndrome, all of which Sylvie does in her own way. On top of everything, Sylvie’s daughter Judita, has no scruples about standing up to her mother, and eventually plays the ultimate card against her.
Against a backdrop of stereotypes, generational clashes, and various forms of social activism, we become spectators of a struggle.
Download English summary
Download English sample
Download German sample
„A striking piece of self-criticism that packs a punch. A harsh, bruising, and fierce confession of the heroine—an ageing intellectual, mother of two children, and lover of many men—uttered in one breath. And so it reads.“
– Alena Machoninová, Russian studies scholar
„Can a woman wake up one day and say #MeToo twenty years after the fact? Or does she have to be a member of the #MeToo generation to do that? An extraordinary novel about culture wars in our everyday life.“
– Tereza Matějčková, philosopher
„Petra Hůlová’s novel gives us the opportunity to experience the changing of two generations, during which the younger group goes into a blind frenzy and sets off on a crusade to condemn the older generation.
– S.d.Ch., playwright
„We cannot rewrite the past, but the past keeps rewriting us. Petra Hůlová has written a book of disillusionment and reconciliation with passionate feminism, concerned with the body’s physiology.“
– Petr Fischer, literary critic and columnist
