born in 1924, the artist, poet and prose writer graduated high school in Kyjov and until 1945 was forced by the occupying Germans to work in the Kyjov glass works. After the war, she studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, first in the atelier of František Tichý, then with Antonín Strnadel. In 1948 she received a scholarship to train in lithography in Zürich. She never returned to Czechoslovakia, but then lived in France, at first alone and then with her husband Leo Gruber, who escaped from Czechoslovakia. In Paris she enrolled at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. In 1952 she moved to Munich, where her husband found editorial work at Radio Free Europe. From 1979 to 2014 she lived in Rosenheim.
Publications:
– the poetry collections Flock of Goldfinches (Rome, 1966) and Fireworks of Futility (Gelterkinden, 1975)
– the poetry anthology Winter Piano (2003)
– the travel sketches Dorfskizzenblátter (Grabenstätt, 1987) and Neue Dorfskizzenblátter aus Oberbayern (Rosenheim, 1997)
– the prose works Polypor (2002), Genealogy (2003), Midnight Diary (2005)
Photo: Přemysl Havlík
