Mornštajnová Alena

Alena Mornštajnová (b. 1963) is a graduate in English and Czech from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ostrava. Having worked as an English language teacher and translator, she now makes her living as a writer. She lives in Valašské Meziříčí. Her debut novel Slepá mapa [Blind Map] was published in 2013; it was followed two years later by the novel Hotýlek [The Little Hotel]. Thanks in large measure to the award-winning novel Hana [Hana] (2017), Mornštajnová has become one of Czechia’s most popular contemporary writers. Her fourth novel Tiché roky [The Silent Years] (2019) won a readers’ poll for Book of the Year. The dystopian novel Listopád [November Fall], published in spring 2021, won the 2022 Cena Česká kniha [Czech Book Award]. Mornštajnová’s psychological novel Les v domě [The Forest Within] was published in 2024. She has also written several books for children. Her books have sold over one million copies in Czechia alone. Her novels have been translated into 24 languages, and foreign rights have been sold to five more countries.

Works translated into: Arabic, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Macedonian, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish, Vietnamese.