Last Goddess

Kateřina Tučková is a Czech playwright, publicist, biographer, art historian, exhibition curator, and bestselling author of The Last Goddess and Gerta. She has won several literary awards, including the Magnesia Litera Award (for both Gerta and The Last Goddess), the Brno City Prize for literature, the Josef Škvorecký Award, and the Czech Bestseller Award. Kateřina is also the recipient of the Freedom, Democracy, and Human Rights Award from the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, and of the Premio Salerno Libro d’Europa at the book fair in Salerno, Italy. Between 2015 and 2018, she was a founder and first president of the Meeting Brno festival, focusing on international and intercultural dialogue. Kateřina currently lives in Prague and Brno, Czech Republic. Her books have been translated into nineteen languages, and her latest novel in Czech is Bílá Voda. For more information, visit www.katerina-tuckova.cz/en/.Andrew Oakland was born in Nottingham in the Midlands of England in 1966. He is a graduate in German from the Universities of Southampton and Nottingham. From 1994 he taught for ten years at Masaryk University in the Czech city of Brno, where he still lives. He has been a freelance translator from the Czech and the German since 2005. Novels in his translation include Michal Ajvaz’s The Golden Age and Empty Streets (both published by Dalkey Archive Press; the former was a Fiction Finalist at the 2011 Best Translated Book Awards), Radka Denemarková’s Money from Hitler (Women’s Press, Toronto), Martin Fahrner’s The Invincible Seven (Pálava Publishing, Brno), and a new rendering of Mikeš, Josef Lada’s classic Czech work for children (published as Nico by Albatros, Prague).

Praise for Kateřina Tučková’s Gerta“The story is an unvarnished chronicle of a young woman doing what she must to protect herself and her daughter.” —Historical Novel Society“Gerta’s main strength is its lyrical language, translated exquisitely from the original Czech into English by Véronique Firkusny. The nimble text elevates the narrative and evokes deep emotions, while succinct descriptions capture Gerta’s—and her country’s—pitiable condition.” —Washington Independent Review of Books“Tučková has tackled one [of] the most difficult chapters in European history, one that has been influencing the relationship between two nations for decades. It’s a tale of prejudice, of exclusion and collective shame. Gerta is both a disturbing novel and a wonderful piece of literature that could easily become a classic.” —The Constant Reader