Věra SládkováHelfer-Hub

Věra Sládková grew up in Jesenik (formerly Frývaldov), a spa town in the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia bordering Germany. In 1938, when she was 11, her family was expelled from the region by the Germans along with other ethnic Czechs, and settled in Poland. During World War II, she was sent to forced labor. After the war, she graduated from business school and became a librarian at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Brno. She married and lived with her ​​husband for a while in Moravia; they later divorced. She wrote poems and contributed to cultural magazines before her first book of short stories, The Stigma of Beauty, was published in 1961. In 1964, she published a collection of poems called Black Swallows. Some of her novellas were dramatized as radio plays and for television. She also wrote a series of successful novels and more short stories -- several from her collection The Return of the Magician were adapted into a 1984 film. In 1983, she remarried to playwright and screenwriter Anthony Hořava.