Marie Stryjová 

Marie Stryjová (1931-1977) was born in Dembrovka, a Czech village in Volhynia in northwestern Ukraine (a region in which Czech, Russian, Polish and Ukrainian nationalities and languages coexisted), where she spent her childhood and early youth. In 1947, her family resettled near Broumov in northeast Bohemia, close to the Polish border, but lost all its possessions in the enforced collectivisation following the 1948 communist putsch in Czechoslovakia. In the early 1960s she began writing fiction, mostly short autobiographical prose set in Volhynia, the Broumov region and Prague, but none of it was published until after her death. ‘Blue’ is her first prose work to be translated into English.