Markéta Pilátová: Nests of magic and realism

Born in 1973 in Kroměříž. She studied Romance languages and history at the Faculty of Arts of Palacký University. She worked at the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Granada in Spain, and taught Czech in São Paulo and Mato Grosso in Brazil; she has also worked for the weekly Respekt. She is a prose writer, poet, author of books for children and young adults, and a translator. For children, she has written book series featuring characters such as a squirrel from Vamberk, the fairy Vivivíla, a girl named Kiko, and the witch Bába Bedla. For adult readers, she has written novels including Žluté oči vedou domů (Yellow Eyes Lead Home, 2007), Tsunami blues (2014), S Baťou v džungli (With Baťa in the Jungle, 2017), Senzibil (The Sensitive One, 2020), and Hnízda (Nests, 2025), in which she enriches the Central European historical experience with the imaginative energy of Latin American magical realism.