Susanna Roth Prize 2021: Uranova
Lenka Elbe: Uranova (Argo, 2020)
The protagonist of the story is fifty-year-old Englishman Henry Robotham, whose girlfriend Angela disappeared without a trace in August 1968 while searching for her Czech ancestors and fell into the ground in Jáchymov. Thirty years later, he returns to the town of uranium, silver, and horrific political crimes on the recommendation of a therapist. He does this to finally put an end to the trauma that has burdened his soul for three decades. Accompanying him on his journey to post-revolutionary Czech Republic is his neurotic partner Suzanne. Together, after several humorous arrival mishaps, they find themselves in a hotel named after the famous discoverer of radium and polonium, Marie Curie-Sklodowska, where the charismatic and strange doctor Estely Hansová works. And it is precisely there that the aforementioned experiment with elements of fantasy, absurdity, and horror begins. Would you be tempted by immortality?
About the author
Lenka Elbe (1979) was born in Louny. She studied journalism and mass communication at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University. After a brief journalistic practice, she began working as an advertising copywriter and occasionally as a television screenwriter. The theme of her work is freedom in an unrelenting struggle against dark currents trying to eliminate it; in her texts, she likes to connect the real and the fantastical world. She has been particularly influenced by the works of Franz Kafka, Umberto Eco, and Haruki Murakami. In addition to writing, she also engages in graphic design and photography. She lives in Prague.
Winning translators
Bulgaria
Borjana Danailova Trajčeva (2000) was born in Sofia. However, she spent most of her life in Lom, where she graduated from Najdena Gerova High School and received a scholarship to study at university. She actively participates in the cultural life of Lom – performing with a ballet group, giving lectures on her own texts; she also previously sang in a choir and attended an ecology club. She has received a scholarship from the Communitas Foundation six times, which allows her to develop in the field of literature. She speaks fluent English – she obtained a Cambridge English certificate (level C2). She is currently in her second year of studying Czech studies at St. Clement of Ohrid University in Sofia and is a member of the university literary club Posluchárna No. 148, where she focuses on writing poetry and short stories. In addition to literature, she is also passionate about music.
France
Anaïs Raimbault (1984) was born in Anjou. She studied applied foreign languages and specialized translation. During her studies, she participated in an Erasmus exchange at Charles University in Prague. Since 2010, she has been working as a translator of specialized texts from English and Czech, and also translates from Catalan and Spanish. She collaborates with the French editorial office of Czech Radio Radio Prague International, for which she prepares cultural contributions and reports. From 2020 to 2021, she participated in a literary translation course at École normale supérieure in Paris. She is interested in the written word in all its forms and enjoys alternating straightforward language of everyday life and pragmatic translations with the polyphonic and polysemous play of literature. She loves to discover the otherness and explore the world. She alternates living in France, Prague, and elsewhere.
Croatia
Silvija Cesarec (1995) was born in Zagreb. In September, she graduated in Czech and Spanish at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb. In the field of Czech, she focuses on translation, while in the field of Spanish, she has chosen teaching. She has always enjoyed learning foreign languages. In addition to Czech and Spanish, she also speaks English and a little Italian. In 2019, she translated the short story "Runner" by Czech writer Radovan Menšík into Croatian as part of a thematic issue of the Croatian literary magazine Artikulacije , titled "Mlada češka pripovijetka" (Young Czech Short Story), which introduced several contemporary Czech authors to Croatian readers.
India
Kartik Somani (1992) lives in New Delhi, India. He completed his postgraduate studies in toxicology at Hamdard University and briefly worked as a research assistant in a genetics laboratory. He would like to engage in publishing activities at an international level. His great passion is exploring various communication methods and influencing the translated language with his mother tongue. In addition to science and reading, he enjoys gardening and portrait drawing.
Italy
Camilla Rimoldi (1992) was born in northern Italy. She graduated from the Faculty of Slavic Studies at the University of Venice and the University of Padua. In 2015, she completed two semesters at Charles University in Prague as part of the Erasmus program, where she studied Czech studies. Her interests include literature, publishing (in 2019 she worked as an assistant in the Foreign Rights department at Marsilio Editori), and visual arts. In the future, she would like to focus on translating contemporary Czech literature into Italian.
Japan
Noriko Kuboi (1980) was born in Tokyo. She studied Czech studies at Tokyo University of Foreign Languages. During her studies, she participated in summer schools of Slavic studies in 2000 at the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice and in 2002 at Charles University in Prague. From June 2006 to January 2012, she lived in Prague, where she worked in tourism and also in insurance. After returning to Japan, she has been freelancing, focusing mainly on translating specialized texts. She enjoys learning foreign languages and has also learned Thai at an intermediate level, having spent four years in northern Thailand since 2016. She has a seven-year-old daughter.
Poland
Olga Bogdan (1991) was born in Poland. She began studying Czech in 2011 in her second year of European studies at the University of Warsaw. During her studies, she traveled to Prague through the Erasmus program, where she completed an intensive Czech course at Charles University. In 2016, she graduated in Czech studies from the Faculty of Philology at the University of Warsaw. She started learning Czech because of her family living in the Czech Republic. In addition to Czech, she speaks English, Spanish, and Slovak. She currently lives and works in Barcelona. In her free time, she enjoys reading, traveling, and volunteering. She loves animals and nature.
Austria
Miriam Aistleitner (1989) grew up near the Czech border and was fortunate to be able to learn Czech in high school. She is still fascinated by Czech with its diverse grammar and beautiful melody. Translating Czech texts represents for her an exploration of foreign terrain – starting with careful, repeated reading of the original that allows her to empathize with the story and its characters, with the goal of giving them a voice in German while capturing the style and rhythm of the original. Translating an excerpt from the novel Uranova by Lenka Elbe was an excellent opportunity to showcase and expand her translation skills. It is a challenging text where witty dialogues and situational comedy alternate with deep emotions, while personal and collective traumas intertwine. Stylistically, it reflects the use of various language layers, i.e., standard and colloquial language, spoken discourse, indirect speech, and inner monologue. A particular translation challenge for her was the broken colloquial Czech in several scenes.
Romania
Andreea Anamaria Idu (1997) was born in the capital of Romania. She graduated from high school in Portuguese and then began studying Czech philology – Czech studies and Portuguese – at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Bucharest. During her studies at the faculty, she entered a competition for professional translations from Czech to Romanian and won second prize. She loves reading and traveling. She has visited the Czech Republic and its two beautiful cities, Prague and Brno, which she fell in love with at first sight, twice. In 2018, she flew to the USA as part of the Work and Travel program and worked in Yellowstone National Park during the summer. Since December 2019, she has been a volunteer at the Czech Centre Bucharest, helping to organize cultural events. She is currently completing her master's degree at the University of Bucharest in European and International Culture and Politics. In the future, she would like to use her language skills in the field of cultural institutions.
Russia
Anna Efimovová (1989) lives in St. Petersburg, where she works as a sales representative for the Czech manufacturing company Alfa Union, which is based in Prague. Here, she is responsible for spreading product sales and closing contracts with customers in Russia. She mostly learned Czech on her own, through self-study and communication with native speakers from the Czech Republic. Her hobbies include tennis, reading, traveling, and intellectual quizzes.
North Macedonia
Jelena Obuchova (1983) was born in Voronezh and graduated from the Faculty of Philology at Voronezh State University. She holds a doctorate in philology, and her dissertation is devoted to proper names in Pushkin's works. In 2005, she studied in Slovakia, where she had the opportunity to get acquainted not only with Slovak culture but also with Czech culture, which she has loved ever since, as well as Czech literature and, of course, the Czech language. She works as a Russian teacher for foreigners and is also a technical translator of Russian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Czech, and Slovak. This was her first translation from Czech to Macedonian.
Slovakia
Júlia Mackovová (1997) is a fifth-year student at the Faculty of Arts at Comenius University in Bratislava, majoring in translation and interpreting with a combination of English and Italian. Even during her studies, she gained a lot of work experience. She worked in companies such as Fidelia Service (administration), Translata, Ltd. (checking completed translations and administration), participated in translating materials for a model conference for the University of Economics in Bratislava from Slovak to Italian, and in 2021 she translated her first book publication for Grada Slovakia titled Floriovci – the Uncrowned Kings of Sicily . She currently works in the marketing department at Avon Cosmetics Slovakia, where her job includes preparing press materials and ad hoc offers for customers, translating product packaging, manuals, and presentations.
Ukraine
Valerii Rudobelets (1996) was born in the city of Sloviansk, Donetsk region in Ukraine. In 2002, he started first grade in elementary school. Before starting his studies at the Slovak University of Transport Infrastructure in 2011, he attended four other schools. In 2015, he graduated from university and continued his studies at Dnipro National University of Railway Transport at the Faculty of Transport Engineering. In 2018, he began studying the master's program in High-Speed Railway Operations. A year later, he participated in an Erasmus exchange at the Czech Technical University in Prague. He obtained his master's degree in 2019. Since 2020, he has been working for Škoda Transportation Ukraine as a designer. He speaks English, Czech, and Polish. He enjoys literature, films, and traveling.
United Kingdom
Dr. Kirsten McMullan (1983) has had numerous opportunities to study due to several fortunate coincidences. Initially, she wanted to become an English teacher, but since childhood, she had an unfulfilled dream of traveling and experiencing other cultures. When she began her career, schools in Scotland welcomed students from Central Europe. Therefore, she decided to study Polish at the University of Glasgow. During her studies, she also had the opportunity to study Czech as an additional language. She received scholarships for summer schools in Poděbrady and České Budějovice. Since then, her interest in Czech studies has grown, and her doctoral dissertation focused on the Czech education system. She now works as an English teacher at a high school in Glasgow.
