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Novelist and essayist Mark Slouka, a guest author at the ongoing Prague Writers’ Festival, was born in New York to Czech refugees who never should have married but stayed together for nearly half a century. For a time, their chaotic lives, often distorted to tell a greater truth, provided rich fodder for his fiction. When both were gone – his father dead, his long-estranged mother suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s – he found the courage to search for the true story behind her “descent into madness”. The Czech version of the resulting memoir,

Fashion initiative We’re Next held their third annual event in Prague on Thursday evening, featuring designs by students from Prague’s Academy of Arts, or Umprum, and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. I attended the show to see the collections and to speak with the young talents who brought them to life.

Welsh writer John Bills currently resides in Prague, but his fondness for Central and Eastern Europe stretches beyond the borders of the Czech Republic. So far beyond, in fact, that he’s written a 600-page book dedicated to history’s greatest Slavs, wryly titled An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery.

Starting in October, the area around Prague‘s metronome will house a large exhibition detailing the key moments in Czech totalitarian history. The project, which was instigated by a joint effort of the Prague City Hall and a grouping of historical institutes, seeks to finally unlock the previously closed network of spaces underneath what used to be Stalin’s giant statue. Yet questions remain about how the spaces are to be used in the long term.

The omnibus documentary film ‘Occupation 1968’ offers a rare glimpse into the invasion of Czechoslovakia from the perspective of common Warsaw Pact soldiers, as well as high-ranking Soviet officers, who took part in the military campaign that crushed the Prague Spring reform movement 50 years ago.

Twenty years ago, Czech artist, graphic designer and musician Maxim Havlíček left for San Francisco with 200 dollars in his pocket and the deep-felt conviction that his destiny lay abroad; that his desire to explore – and paint – could not be truly fulfilled unless he left his homeland, perhaps forever. His reading of the Paulo Coelho novel The Alchemist proved the catalyst for that continuing artistic journey, and so Havlíček has borrowed the title for his upcoming exhibition in Prague.

In the run-up to the 23rd International Bagpipe Festival in Strakonice, a special bagpipe exhibition has opened up to the public. Seventy of these instruments from all parts of the world will be on view until the end of August.

We can safely say that the songs you will hear today are well-known to generations of Czechs since their childhood. Everyone has watched fairy-tale movies at some point in their lives and the melodies from these films stuck in their heads forever.

Yale Strom, a professor and artist-in-residence in the Jewish studies programme at San Diego State University, is something of a modern-day renaissance man. Steeped in Old World traditions, the violinist-composer delights in bringing all-but-forgotten klezmer music and Yiddish songs from the former Soviet Union, central Europe and Balkans to the stage.

An annual international opera festival celebrating the works of Bedřich Smetana – perhaps the most famous Czech composers of all time – kicks off on Thursday in the eastern Bohemian town of his birth. Now in its 60th year, the "Smetana’s Litomyšl" festival is a paradise for classical music lovers but also features everything from jazz to folk.