HELLA By the Czech writer and translator Alena Machoninová

Maraton, 2023, 264 pp
978-80-884-1124-6

Literary prizes

2025 Visegrad Literary Award (includes a sum towards an English or German translation)

2024 Magnesia Litera – Book of the Year

2023 The Czech Literary Foundation’s Prize

Rights sold:

Russia (Ivan Limbakh Publishers) Serbia (IK Prometej)

Foreign rights contact:

Maraton Publishers
maraton@emaraton.cz

Russian literature scholar and translator Alena Machoninová’s literary debut, Hella is a fascinating mixture of fiction and autofiction, memoir, biography and literary history, steeped in 20th century Russian culture and history. The book attempts to piece together the elusive life of her protagonist, based on a real person, Helena Frischerová, a Moravian-born woman who followed her communist husband to Russia in the 1930s during the Stalinist terror and ended up in the Gulag. This literary reconstruction is cleverly intertwined with references to other works of fiction and essays that relate to traumatic narratives, experiences of terror and violence, or texts that have simply moved the author for one reason or another (Platonov, Shalamov, Stepanova, Benjamin, Sontag).