Czech Books | All stories

Franz Kafka t-shirts, Franz Kafka mugs, Franz Kafka postcards, Franz Kafka Russian dolls - you name it, you'll find it on Prague's Old Town Square. Throughout the city centre a million gloomy Kafkas stare out with sad black eyes from under that characteristic black trilby. Kafka has become an obsession of Prague's tourist industry - so much so that true lovers of Kafka's work must sometimes feel tempted to go out and vandalize a few of the stalls and return a sense of dignity to the city's most famous literary son.

In this week's programme we talk to Zuzana Krupickova about Milan Kundera, and in particular his most recent novel "Ignorance". Zuzana has been living in Paris for over five years and there she took her doctorate on Kundera at the Sorbonne. Last year she also translated into Czech the first French Romantic poet Alphonse de la Martine, the first Czech translation of his Poetic Meditation. But today we focus on "Ignorance", Kundera's study of the nature of exile and return, which was recently translated into English.

This week in Czech Books we talk to Marie Chribkova, proprietor of One Woman Press, which was founded in 1997. She tells us what inspired her to found her own publishing house.

When Josef Fronek began working on his Czech-English dictionary in the late 1970s, he embarked on a journey spanning four decades, which still continues to this day. His project had fairly humble beginnings: He began by collecting samples of English usage in shoeboxes. Today, his English-Czech/Czech-English dictionaries could almost be considered "required reading" for any Czech scholars studying English or English-speaking students brave enough to take on the complex Czech language.

Today I'm joined by Radim Kopac, who is one of the better known figures of the Prague literary scene. Radim was born in 1976. He studied media theory at Charles University, and works as a journalist. He is involved with Czech Radio, and writes book reviews and essays; he has also often helped other authors, who are trying to publish their books. Radim is well known as editor of the literary magazine "Intelektual".

Pavel Zajicek is a contemporary Czech legend. Now in his early fifties, he is a poet, musician and artist, and although he prefers not to use the term, he was at the very heart of Prague's underground scene in the 1970s, when the regime was slowly and systematically paring away at all the reforms of the decade before.

Tomas Mika is a man of many talents - poet, translator and hip-hop performer. Today we talk to him about his most recent work and his history as a poet, but I'd like to start with his work as a translator. The books he's translated include Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress", James Hogg's "Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner" and most recently Samuel Beckett's "Watt".

This special edition of Czech Books comes from the Hotel Josef in one of the winding medieval streets of Prague's Old Town; this is where writers from different corners of the globe - from Saint Petersburg to Johannesburg - have gathered for the 14th Prague Writers' Festival. Prague is right in the heart of Europe: if you go some fifteen hundred kilometres to the north-west, you get to Britain, if you go the same distance in the opposite direction, you reach Greece. So with just days to go till the expansion of the European Union, I'm joined by

Our report this week comes from the third Literature Seminar in the town of Kostelec. For the last three years the British Council has organised this three-day event which provides an opportunity for visiting British writers to meet Czech academics, as well as budding young translators and students of literature. Kostelec is a small historical town about an hour outside Prague. Reporting from there for Radio Prague was Bernie Higgins.

Justin Quinn arrived in Prague from Dublin in 1992. He is a teacher of literature at Charles University. He has written three highly regarded collections of poetry: the first is the very strangely named "The O,o,a,a Bird", the second is the book "Privacy" and the third is "Fuselage". Justin joins Bernie Higgins in the studio.