Monika Zgustova was born in Prague and spent her formative years in the United States. She has published five novels, a collection of short stories, and a biography, and two of her plays have been staged. Her work has been translated into nine languages and has won several prestigious awards, including the 2009 Mercè Rodoreda Award for short fiction. She has also won critical acclaim for her novels The Silent Woman (2005), Winter Garden (2009), and Goya’s Glass (2012). Zgustova has translated more than fifty fiction books from Czech and Russian into both Spanish and Catalan. She currently lives in Barcelona, Spain, and regularly contributes opinion-editorial articles to the leading Spanish newspaper, El País.