Heaven Has No Ground
by Hana Adronikova
Heaven Has No Ground is the fierce, intimate story of Ama, a young woman who is reckoning with the death of her father when she receives her own cancer diagnosis and, contrary to the wishes of family and friends, decides to seek alternative treatments rather than conventional chemotherapy and radiation. While this book was published as a work of fiction to great acclaim in the Czech Republic, it follows very closely the life story of its author, Hana Andronikova, who wrote the book during a period of optimism in her own battle with breast cancer. Much like Hana, Ama travels the world to find guidance and healing—going to Peru to consult a shaman and receive the Amazon’s wisdom; to communities of Christian believers and Native Americans in the Nevada desert; and to the holy sites of Israel. Using striking metaphors and intensely emotional language in journal entries, emails, and narrative fragments, Andronikova takes us with her on a remarkable journey as she comes to grips with her human limitations and celebrates her place in the circle of life.
About the Author
About the Translator
Born in Zlín, Czech Republic, in 1967, Hana Andronikova studied English and Czech literature at Charles University in Prague. After a detour into the corporate world, she turned to fiction writing and won instant acclaim for her first novel, The Sound of the Sundial, receiving the Magnesia Litera Award for Best New Discovery in 2002. Her book of short stories, Heart on a Hook, cemented her national literary reputation; she was particularly noted for her use of time as a structural element. In 2007, she was sponsored by the U.S. State Department to attend the International Writing Program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after her return home, and Heaven Has No Ground, though presented as a work of fiction, is a personal chronicle of her fight with the illness. For this work, she won the Magnesia Litera again in 2011, but lost the battle for her life at the end of that year. She was 44 years old.
Roman Kostovski was born in Prague, in 1968. He has a B.A. from the College of William and Mary and an M.A. from the University of Maryland. He studied Czech language and literature at Charles University in Prague as a post-graduate. He has taught Czech at George Washington University and worked as a Central and Southeastern European research analyst at Georgetown University. He translates poetry and prose from Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Slovak into English. His writings and translations have appeared in numerous journals, including Absinthe-New European Writings and Watchword Press and the Poet Lore. His book translations include Arnost Lustig’s Fire on Water (Northwestern University Press, 2006), Viktor Dyk’s The Ratcatcher (Plamen Press, 2014), Vitězslav Nezval’s Farewell and a Handkerchief-Poems from the Road (Plamen Press, 2020). He received an NEA Translation Fellowship Award in 2017. He founded Plamen Press in 2014, a print-on-demand publishing house for the promotion of literature from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. He works and resides in the Washington, D.C. area.
Relax, Set Yourself Free: On Hana Andronikova’s “Heaven Has No Ground”
SHORTLY BEFORE CELEBRATING her 40th birthday in September 2007, Czech author Hana Andronikova was selected as one of 30 participants for the University of Iowa’s prestigious annual International Writing Program. As part of her application, she submitted translated excerpts from her 2001 debut novel, Zvuk slunečních hodin (The Sound of the Sundial). Read More…
Publication of Heaven Has No Ground was achieved with grants from:
