is a native of Prague where she was born in 1957. After grade school she first attended a two-year business school from which he transferred to a classical grammar school. She then wanted to continue her studies at the Drama Academy but was turned down. When she was twenty she became a signatory of the Charter 77. As a consequence, she was allowed to work only in various menial jobs prior to 1989.
Tereza Boučková lives with her husband and her son at Záhrabská, a weekend house colony in Svatý Jan pod Skalou (St. John under the Cliff), a picturesque village near Beroun about 20 km west of Prague.
In 1990 she won the Jiří Orten Prize for her prose titled Indiánský běh (Indian Run) which has been since then published in several foreign languages.
After that she published prose volumes Křepelice (The Quail Hen, 1993), Když milujete muže (Loving a Man, 1995), Krákorám (Crowing, 1998).
A book titled Jen tak si trochu schnít–fejetony o mužích a lidech (Just (Re)Pining–Sketches on Men and Humans, 2004) is a volume of her best newspaper feuilletons.
Tereza Boučková also wrote the script for a film directed by Zdeněk Tyc and titled Smradi (Brats, 2002).
In the year 2006 she won the First Prize for her script Zemský ráj to napohled (An Earthy Paradise of the Eyes To Behold). The script is already filmed and is directed by Irena Pavlásková (opening 17th of November 2009!)
In 2007 was produced her stage adaptation of F.Fellini´s famous film La Strada.
In 2008 she published the authobiografic novel Rok kohouta (The Year of Rooster), which became the bestseller of the year 2008/2009. Untill now are 51 790 copies sold!
more on: http://www.czechlit.cz/authors/bouckova-tereza/
The Year of the Rooster, the new, autobiographic novel by Tereza Boučková is a candidly harrowing story of a woman searching for strength to rebuild her life which has ended in shambles. The twelve animals in the Chinese zodiac include that of a rooster and this is the sign under which the author was born fifty one years ago and which actually has just recently ended. Although it was to be the time in which “problems of the previous year will be set off by considerable improvement”, Tereza Boučková experienced just the opposite: her year saw a final breakdown of her fate-challenging, artificially set-up family as the genetic heritage, characters and after-effects of the previous psychic deprivation of her adopted sons came to a head in their pubescence starting a mad, incessant giddy-go-round of action and reaction affecting all involved who found it impossible to challenge. The disintegration of the family which the author heretofore saw as her ultimate value was coupled with other disasters in the form of crisis of middle age and creativity. The recourse which Tereza Boučková seeks is painful and uncompromising, first of all to her self, and her writing is marked by humour, often quite broad and rough. While novel may seem to be a merciless ending of a story so mercifully started in her most significant prose Indiánský běh (Indian Run), in fact it may well be the other way round, for The Year of the Rooster develops from sheer hopelessness to a liberating courage. NEWSPAPER NOTICES A YEAR YOU’D HATE TO EXPERIENCE TEREZA BOUČKOVÁ: THE YEAR OF THE ROOSTER Kateřina Kadlecová, Reflex, 19. 6. 2008 (...) Her new autobiographical novel will long be the talk of not only literary and culture circles, for The Year of the Rooster is an excellently written story packed with inner dynamics, passion and thrilling detective mysteries for the initiates but also dwells on many issues that seem to be politically and socially taboo. The Year of the Rooster: Desolation and Hope Olga Stehlíková, Pražský deník, 11. 6. 2008 A SPRINGTIME BOOK OF THE YEAR
Marta Ljubková, Instinkt, 10. 7. 2008
(...) However, Boučková is far from moralising or from raising a warning finger, as she just laconically presents the reader with the story of her everyday life. She is not after cheap raciness and her narrative, thrilling enough as it is, not even for moment slithers to mere tripe: The Year of the Rooster is written by a sure hand of a female writer who is often given to self-irony and frequently also to self-contemplation but who veers her crisis with literary reinvigoration. Moreover, she has what current Czech prose sadly lacks, i.e. a strong story engulfing the reader from the first page to the last, without overcoming him with a feeling of awkwardness and shame.
(...) The drama of the subject is rendered with astoundingly forthright poignancy, contrasts taken to the ultimate within terse sentences create dynamics so characteristic for all of the author’s texts including her sketches written for newspapers and underline a feeling of anxiety and desolation one experiences from reading the book.
Pavel Šrut, Právo, 29. 5. 2008
(...) the stylised diary entries, reflections and comments of this more than three hundred pages’ long novel are something that I am able to share and experience in a way which engrosses me more than just a reader, even though her problems with adopted Romany boys in whom genes topped with a crèche-induced estrangement won over growing up in a family marked by a (unfortunately) dying marital relation and a (fortunately) unconsummated extra-marital liaison are of such a sincere and yet as remote an interest to me as the earthquake in Sichuan. On the other hand, the author has forced me to admit and share something much more general and at same time more personal, i.e. a feeling of solitude even though I know not under which Chinese sign I was born.