Simona Bohatá

Simona Bohatá spent her adolescence in Prague’s Žižkov district, which had a great influence on her, as did the Prague music and theatre scene of the 1980s. Her novel Lucky Beny (2021) follows a young photographer coming of age in communist Czechoslovakia. Escaping a violent home and the pressures of compulsory military service, he finds an unlikely refuge among outsiders living and working at a Prague scrapyard. The novel was a finalist for the 2022 Magnesia Litera Award. Bohatá is also an acclaimed short fiction writer, with two short story collections published in Czech.