Petra Hůlová & Alex Zucker in Conversation

This event is devoted to the work of Petra Hůlová, a leading Czech writer, and Alex Zucker, possibly the best contemporary translator from Czech. It is a rare opportunity to meet them both in a seminar type discussion, moderated by Dr Jana Fischerova from the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at Trinity College Dublin. In addition to discussing both guests’ work in general, we shall focus on Petra Hůlová’s recent book Stručné dějiny hnutí, a dark, funny dystopian novel, which Alex Zucker has translated into English as The Movement. The thought-provoking text, which has been called both feminist and anti-feminist, is about what could happen if women were able to stop men from seeing them only as objects of lust.

Petra Hůlová’s provocative novels, plays, and screenplays have won many prizes (including the ALTA National Translation Award for her debut novel, All This Belongs to Me, in Alex Zucker’s translation), and she is a regular commentator on current events for the Czech press. She studied language, culture, and anthropology at universities in Prague, Ulan Bator, and New York, and was a Fulbright scholar in the US. Her 11 novels and 3 plays have been translated into 13 languages. Her latest novel, Trump Card (Nejvyšší karta), asks the question: Can a woman wake up one day and say #MeToo 20 years after the fact?

Alex Zucker has translated novels by Petra Hůlová, Jáchym Topol, Bianca Bellová, J. R. Pick, Magdaléna Platzová, Tomáš Zmeškal, Josef Jedlička, Heda Margolius Kovály, Patrik Ouředník and Miloslava Holubová, as well as subtitles, short stories, plays, song lyrics, essays, philosophy, art history and opera. His translation of Bianca Bellová’s The Lake won the EBRD Literature Prize 2023. He is a past co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee, and has collaborated with the Authors Guild on two surveys of working conditions for literary translators in the U.S. and the Guild’s first model contract for literary translation.