Sylva Fischerová

Fischerová was born on November 5, 1963, and grew up in Olomouc. She studied French at a language school in Brno, and in 1983 began studies in Philosophy at the Charles University Faculty of Arts in Prague and Physics at the CU Faculty of Mathematics and Physics; in 1985 she transferred to Classical Philology at the same university, where in 1991 she received her M.A., writing her thesis on “The problem of unity of arete in Plato (the Protagoras dialogue)”. She did her post-graduate studies at the same faculty, writing her doctoral dissertation on “Can the Muses Lie? (The Muses in the proem of Hesiod’s Theogony)”.^[2]

Since 1992 she has been employed as an assistant professor at the Institute of Greek and Latin Studies at Charles University Prague. In 2020, she obtained her habilitation for her thesis dedicated to the Hippocratic treatise On the Nature of Man. At present she lectures on Classical Greek literature, religion and philosophy.^[3] She is the author of twelve collections of poetry, as well as short stories, novels, and books for children.

Her book-long interview with philosopher Karel Floss won the Czech Literary Foundation Prize in 2011.^{[citation needed][4]}

In 2018 she was named the first City Poet of Prague.

She is the daughter of psychologist Jarmila Fischerová (1926–1992) and Josef Ludvík Fischer, the Czech philosopher and first rector of Palacký University after its re-establishment after WW2, in which he played a major role. Her half-sister Viola Fischerová was also a poet; and Sylva was sister-in-law to writers Karel Michal and Josef Jedlička via marriage to Viola.

Her daughter Ester Fischerová is also a poet, with two collections of poetry published to date.^[5]