Petr Hruška

Petr Hruška is a Czech poet known for his acute powers of observation. Hruška’s poetry has won several literary prizes, including the 2023 Magnesia Litera, the 2013 Czech State Prize for Literature, and the 1998 Dresden Poetry Prize. 

Hruška’s poetry collections include Minout se přesně (“Missing Precisely”; Host, 2024), Spatřil jsem svou tvář (“I Caught Sight of My Face”; Host, 2022), Nevlastní (“Not one’s own”; Argo, 2017), Jedna věta (“One Sentence”; Revolver Revue, 2015), and Zelený svetr (“The Green Sweater”; Host, 2004), an omnibus of three earlier books, plus a collection of prose, V závalu: sloupky, podpovídky, odstavce a jiné krátké texty (“In an Avalanche: Columns, Sub-Stories, Paragraphs, and Other Short Texts”; Revolver Revue, 2020). Collections of Hruška’s poetry have been translated into English, French, German, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Croatian, and Slovenian. In 2023, Everything Indicates: Selected Poems, translated by Jonathan Bolton, was published by Blue Diode Press. In 2024, I Caught Sight of My Face (translated by Joshua Mensch) was published by Kulturalis in the UK. 

Hruška graduated from the VSB–Technical University of Ostrava with a degree in water treatment and purification in 1987, from the University of Ostrava with an MS in Czech literature and literary science in 1994, and from Masaryk University with a PhD dissertation on postwar surrealism in 2003.

As a researcher, Hruška has worked at the Institute for Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno, where his area of research covered Czech poetry of the twentieth century. Hruška has taught Czech literature at Masaryk University. He is a member of the editorial board of the magazine Host and editor of the magazine Obrácená strana měsíce (“The Far Side of the Moon”). From 1995 until 1998, he participated in the publication of the Landek magazine, collaborating with Jan Balabán and others. 

All translations of titles are approximate.