Magdaléna Stárková was born in Ostrava, grew up in Olomouc, Czech Republic, and has lived as a freelance author and translator in Bremen in northern Germany since 2014. She is a graduate of Polish and English philology and Jewish studies at the Palacký University in Olomouc and Jewish Studies at the Central European University in Budapest.
Stárková worked as a literary translator for PLAV, the monthly magazine for world literature (including texts by Cynthia Ozick, Karin Fellner and Rachel Korn). She published in the Czech literary periodicals Host, Kulturní noviny, Lžička v šuplíku, Herberk and H_aluze and, together with Marek Epstein, Viola Fischerová, Josef Moník, Petra Soukupová and others, in the anthologies Moře a pláž (Listen, 2012) and O lidech a psech, Prague (Listen, 2013). Poems in Italian by Magdaléna Stárková have been published on the cultural blog Alza La Mano Adesso!
In the Czech Republic, Magdaléna Stárková's independent publications include a collection of short stories entitled Modré okenice, Prague (Motto, 2015), and the two volumes of poetry Povyjan, (ARSCI, 2012), and Modře a měkce, (ARSCI, 2013), both with illustrations by Marie Krappmann.
The first German-language publication of Magdaléna Stárková's poems was in 2018 in the literary journal Sinn und Form: Die Nacht verteilt. Poems, in: Sinn und Form 1 (2018). Her first volume of poetry in German was published by Sujet Verlag (Bremen) under the name Mein nächstes erstes Wort (2020).
