Viola Parente-Čapková is a professor of Finnish literature at the University of Turku and a senior lecturer of literary theory at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. She works as a literary theoretician, translator and editor. Her areas of expertise include Finnish literature in a broader European context, literary history and reception, philology and Finnish as a foreign language, gender theory in literary research, narrative medicine and questions of otherness in literature.
She is the author of dozens of translations of poetry and prose from Finnish into Czech, including an anthology of contemporary Finnish poetry she translated and edited in 1998 (Má tvář v jazyce [My Face in Language]), works by Mika Waltari (e.g. Už nikdy nebude zítra [No More Tomorrow], Hejkal 1995/2003), Anja Snellman (Čas dotyků [Time of Skin], Ivo Železný 2001), and Johanna Sinisalo (Ne před slunce západem [Not Before Sunset], One Woman Press 2003). She is also the author and editor of numerous articles and monographs, including those devoted to the work of Kiba Lumberg and her position in Finnish literature, as well as in the context of feminist literature and feminist ethnoautobiography (Romano džaniben 2015; Multiethnica 2011, 2018, AVM / Akademische Verlagsgemeinschaft München, 2020, 2023). She also occasionally translates from Italian and English.
For the Kher publishing house, she has translated two volumes of Kiba Lumberg's Memesa trilogy, published in Czech under the titles Černý motýl (Kher 2024) and Potrhaná křídla (Kher 2025).
Photo: Aleksi Poutanen
