Petr Hruška (poet)


Petr Hruška is a Czech poet, screenwriter, literary critic and academic.

Life

Hruška was born in Ostrava, a city known for coal-mining and steel production, and many of his poems reflect the industrial, working-class nature of the city, whose traditional industries have gone pear-shaped. He got his engineering degree at VŠB-Technical University of Ostrava, MA at the Faculty of Arts of University of Ostrava and Ph.D. at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University in Brno. He works at the Department of Czech Literature at Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno where he focuses on Czech post-1945 poetry. He co-authored the four-volume History of Czech literature 1945 – 1989, the second volume of the Dictionary of Czech writers since 1945, and Dictionary of Czech Literary Magazines, Periodical Anthologies and Almanacs 1945 – 2000.
He also worked as a university lecturer of Czech literature at Masaryk University and the University of Ostrava. He was a member of the body of editors of the magazine Host and an editor of the magazine Obrácená strana měsíce. Between 1995 – 1998 he participated in publishing the magazine Landek. He co-organises literary evenings, festivals and exhibitions in Ostrava ; he also acts in the cabaret of Jiří Surůvka.
His twin brother Pavel is a literary critic. Petr Hruška lives with his partner Yvetta Ellerová and their three children in Ostrava.

Works

Petr Hruška says: "Poetry is not a decoration of life". According to him, poetry must "excite, disturb, amaze, surprise, unsettle the reader, demolish the existing aesthetic satisfactions and create new ones." Described as a poet of unrest and hidden dangers in everyday life, he confronts readers with a world seemingly familiar, and yet surprising in its reality. Casual situations are the source of a subtle tension and deep, though at first glance hardly noticeable meaning. He said in an interview: "I think that real grace and gracefulness appear only where all the gloominess, depression, and weariness of life, all the 'loneliness of the relationship' are somehow present as well. Only in the midst of that can a thin thread of light shine, a thin thread, which however contains all the fateful nearness that two people are capable of."
About Hruška's work, poet Ivan Wernisch wrote: "You manage to write poetry without unavailing things, that is, without lyrical babbling." He is one of the most praised Czech poets of the post-1989 era.
He publishes poetry in many magazines, writes reviews for Tvar and the Czech Radio Vltava, and writes academic articles His poems have been translated into English, French, German, Slovenian, Italian, Dutch, Polish and Croatian. In 1998 he was awarded the Dresdner Lyrikpreis and in 2009 the Jan Skácel Award. His poetry collection Darmata won the Czech State Award for Literature in 2013. In Italy he won the Premio Piero Ciampi 2014. He was the editor of the Collected Works of Jan Balabán and Selected Poems by Ivan Martin Jirous; he also compiled an anthology of 20th-century Czech poetry for a Slovenian edition.

Poetry books

Czech:
Foreign: