Alena Mornštajnová: The past & the flowers
– Czechia
Alena Mornštajnová was born in 1963 in Valašské Meziříčí. She studied English and Czech at the University of Ostrava. She worked as an English teacher and translator. In the last decade she has become one of the most successful Czech writers after 1989, her work being translated into more than twenty languages.
Mornštajnová writes books for children, for example, Strašidýlko Stráša (Stráša the Little Ghost, 2018) or Modrá planeta (Blue Planet, 2024), but mostly novels: Slepá mapa (Blind Map, 2013), Hotýlek (The Little Hotel, 2015), Hana (2017), Tiché roky (Years of Silence, 2019), Listopád (2021), Les v domě (The Forest in the House, 2023) and Čas vos (The Time of Wasps, 2025). The publisher describes her latest novel as “a story about the power of the past and the power of flowers”.