Monika Zgustova is an award-winning author whose works have been published in more than ten languages. She was born in Prague and studied comparative literature in the United States (University of Illinois and University of Chicago). She then moved to Barcelona, where she writes for El Pais, The Nation, and CounterPunch, among others. As a translator of Czech and Russian literature into Spanish and Catalan-including the writing of Havel, Kundera, Hrabal, Hasek, Dostoyevsky, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Babel-Zgustova is credited with bringing major twentieth-century writers to Spain. Her book Dressed for a Dance in the Snow: Women's Voices from the Gulag was a World Literature Today Notable Translation of the Year.