PROFILE BIANCA BELLOVÁ


powerful encounters


Memories, dreams and


TEXT Tom Tivnan


ianca Bellová’s Jezero (The Lake) was originally published in Czechia in 2016, winning a host of home- grown and international awards straight out of the


box. Seven years on it is still building momentum with a cascade of rights deals across the globe (23 translations have been published or are forthcoming). And it is still garnering laurels, most recently nabbing this year’s European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Literature Prize for Welsh indie Parthian’s 2022 English-language release, translated by Alex Zucker. The novel’s growing reputation has much to do with Prague-born Bellová’s increased international profile as one of the biggest stars in Czech letters. But also that The Lake, which takes in dystopian themes, has become more relevant and prescient as the years go


 BIANCA BELLOVÁ IS ABOUT TO PUBLISH HER EIGHTH BOOK


on. The novel is set in an unnamed (though obviously post-Soviet) fishing village in which the nearby body of water—once the town’s


lifeblood—is shrinking and becoming increasingly poisonous. We see the action through Nami, a motherless boy who witnesses his home town teetering on collapse. So he sets off across the land to try to find both his mother and some sort of reconciliation for his community. Bellová’s book unflinchingly looks at the harsher costs of man-made climate change, from birth deformities to near-societal collapse. It is all the more shocking that we see it through the eyes of a boy—and that part


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THE LAKE BIANCA BELLOVÁ  PARTHIAN, PB, £10, 9781913640521 A DYSTOPIAN   PRIZE FOR LITERATURE  LITERATURE PRIZE.


Photography: Marta Režová


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