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. Long Version (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
Long Version
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?
In her early fifties, Czech author Sylvie Novak looks back on her successful career. As she embarks on a tour to promote her book of feminist essays—which she’s not convinced has captured the nature of gender inequality—her teenage daughter Judita finds her journals from her youth, discovering the intimate relationship she had with a much older writer. Judita is convinced the experience scarred her for life, whereas Novak considers her daughter’s views to be ignorant and absolutist, however critical she is towards the deep-seated machismo of Eastern European dissident cultures. Meanwhile, the man she loves has found a new, younger object of desire, leaving Novak to reflect on the decline of her sex appeal.
In Long Version, we become spectators of Novak’s tightrope walk, balancing between the old generation and the new, love and desire, and above all the myriad interpretations of the past. Like Hůlová, Novak seeks not to lay blame or win sympathy, but to explore the shifting meanings of feminism at a time of polarized thinking and, perhaps, discover a path towards reconciliation.
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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
