Daniela Hodrová


Daniela Hodrová is a Czech writer and literary scholar.

Biography

Hodrová was born in Prague on 5 July 1946. She did postgraduate studies in French and comparative literature. In 1972–75, she worked as an editor of Slavonic literature in the Odeon publishing house. Since 1975, she worked at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Academy of Sciences, where she is now a Senior Researcher.
Her novels typically incorporate topics from her work as a literary scholar, "especially the classification of novels into roman-realité and the roman-invention, or the pioneering theory about the meaning and forms of the initiation storyline in a work of literature." She is perhaps best known for a trilogy called Trýznivé město, they are distinctive "Prague novels, which aim to convey emblematically the genius loci of this central European city, of whose history Hodrová highlights the tragic features."
Two of her works have been translated into English, Prague, I see a city..., in 2011, translated by David Short and A Kingdom of Souls, in 2015, translated by Véronique Firkusny and Elena Sokol, both published by Jantar Publishing.