Hana Andronikova was born in Zlín, Czech Republic in 1967, and studied English and Czech literature at Charles University in Prague. She turned to writing full time after many years of working in the corporate financial sector, and won instant acclaim for her first novel, The Sound of the Sundial (Knizní klub, 2001) receiving the Czech Book Club Literary Award and the Magnesia Litera Award for Best New Discovery in 2002. Her book of short stories, Heart on a Hook (Petrov, 2002), cemented her national literary reputation, and in 2007 she was sponsored by the U.S. State Department to attend the International Writing Program at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop. She was particularly noted for her use of time as a structural element in the narrative, and her skill at conveying intimate and dramatic moments using terse sentences and fragments. She was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after her return home. Her book Heaven Has No Floor (Odeon, 2010) is a personal chronicle of her fight with illness and the looming possibility of death. For this work she won the Magnesia Litera again in 2011, but lost the battle for her life at the end of that same year. She was 44 years old.