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Today we look at a Czech poet who is one of the icons of 19th century Czech literature, Karel Jaromir Erben. I'm going to be talking to someone who knows a great deal about Erben, Susan Reynolds, who is curator of Czech and Slovak literature at the British Library in London. She has recently completed the first ever full English translation of Erben's most famous work, "Kytice" or "The Bouquet".

In Czech Books this week we are looking at a new Czech book "Jsme hrdi na svou zemi?" - 'Are we proud of our country?' written by Petr Majer. The book poses the question: what do Czechs from many different walks of life, from the military to sports, the arts and politics, think about patriotism, and how do they relate to their homeland?

There must be few writers anywhere in the world who have led quite such fascinating lives as Lenka Reinerova. Now an energetic 88-year-old with a glint in her eye and a charisma that give her the look of someone at least 15 years younger, she has lived through many of the dramas of the 20th century. Today she is settled in Prague, the city where she grew up in a middle-class Jewish family before the war. With the rise of fascism, like many of her generation, she embraced communism, in the hope of resisting the menace that was coming from Germany,

In this week's programme we talk to Professor Peter Steiner, who wrote a fascinating book about Czech literature. He was born in Prague and left in 1968 to go to America. He taught at Michigan and Harvard before settling at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches in the department of Slavic languages and literature.

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.