Tereza Jandová (born 1979), known by her pen name Jakuba Katalpa, is a Czech writer, primarily of novels. She is best known for her Czech Book Award-winning novel NÃÂmci (2012), which examines the history of the Sudetenland through a woman's relationship with her grandmother.
Jakuba Katalpa was born Tereza Jandová in 1979 in Plzeà Â, in what was then Czechoslovakia. She studied psychology, media studies, and Czech studies at Charles University in Prague, graduating in 2005.
Jandová's first published work was the 2000 short story collection Krásné bolesti ("Lovely Pain"), followed by the collection PovÃÂdka beze jména ("Story Without a Name") in 2003. She subsequently began writing novels under the pen name Jakuba Katalpa.
The first of these, the novella Je hlÃÂna k snÃÂdku? ("Can Mud Be Eaten?"), was published in 2006. It was shortlisted for the Magnesia Litera Discovery of the Year Award. She then wrote her first full-length novel, Hoà Âké moà Âe ("Bitter Sea"), in 2008. Perhaps her most personal work, it was shortlisted for the Jià ÂàOrten Award for young writers.
In 2012, Katalpa published NÃÂmci ("Germans"), which would become her most popular work. NÃÂmci won the Czech Book Award and the Josef à  kvorecký Award, and it was nominated for the Magnesia Litera Award for Prose. It tells the story of a Czech woman living in London who travels to search for her estranged German grandmother. While much of her earlier work was experimental, NÃÂmci is characterized by its realism. The title, NÃÂmci, is the Czech word for "Germans," but the term derives from the word "mute," a reference to the tense silence around the Czech Republic's history with Germany.
After writing the novel DoupÃÂ ("The Den") in 2017, in 2020 Katalpa published the novel Zuzanin dech ("Zuzana's Breath"), which also deals with the tensions of life in the Sudetenland. It tells the story of the daughter of a Jewish sugar factory owner during the Holocaust. In 2025, she published ÃÂlice: Liebesroman, which is also set during World War II in the German-Czech borderlands.