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Jan Zelenka was born in 1947 in Prague. His father Václav Zelenka was a bank clerk, his mother Magdalena Zelenková worked as a laboratory technician. Jan Zelenka studied English and Czech at the Faculty of Filosophy of Charles University. In 1968 he briefly interrupted his studies at Charles University because during the Prague Spring he received a one-year scholarship to study English and American literature at Rollins College in Florida. After returning from the United States, he completed his studies at the Faculty of Filosophy of Charles University and after military service in Havlíčkův Brod, he joined the English-American section of the Odeon publishing house in 1973. During the period of normalisation, he and his colleagues helped translators who could not do their work for political reasons. He enabled them to „cover“ their texts with other people from the field. In 1981, StB officers caught Jan Zelenka on a visit to the home of the chartist Karel Kyncl as they were about to search the house, and subsequently issued instructions to dismiss him from his job. In doing so, they attempted to „punish“ him for allowing the Kyncls to cover the translation of the novel The Rat King with Jarmila Hanzlova. However, Jan Zelenka, probably thanks to the cohesion of the Odeon staff, remained in the English-American editorial office. After 1989, he participated in editing and revising the works of Václav Havel and briefly served as a cultural advisor at the Czech embassy in Washington. From 1995-2010 he worked at Reader‘s Digest Publishing House, then as a freelance editor, editor, translator and literary critic.
