Czech Books | All stories

In this edition of Czech Books we look at the work of Richard Weiner, a Czech writer of the first half of the twentieth century, who was immensely influential on his own and later generations of writers and yet today is little read and little known outside the Czech Republic. Even within the country, among the writers of the period of the First Republic, he is far from being a household name. This neglect is very much undeserved, and one person who has been trying to draw attention to Richard Weiner and his legacy is the translator and literary

It is estimated that some ten million Roma live in Europe – the equivalent of the total population of the Czech Republic. But we hear very little about Romany writing. A new anthology published by the Museum of Romany Culture in Brno and called “Čalo vod’i” (Full Soul) is helping to put that right, bringing together four decades of prose written by Romany authors in the Czech Republic. All the stories were written in the Romany language, and this attractive hardback edition with parallel Romany and Czech texts offers rich insights into Romany life

As a writer Jiří Stránský has never had to look far beyond his own extraordinary life story for inspiration. He was born in 1931 into an influential Prague political family – in fact his maternal grandfather even served for three years as prime minister in the 1930s. During the German occupation Jiří’s father Karel survived Auschwitz, and as a teenager Jiří took part in the Prague Uprising in the last days of the war. But ironically, the family suffered just as much under the communists after the war as they had under the Germans. They had never

Lamis Khalilová is half Czech and half Palestinian. She is the head of the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at the Metropolitan University in Prague and is a member of the board of directors of Amnesty International for the Czech Republic. The battle for human rights is something that she cares about passionately and she has taken a particular interest in the complex problems faced by women in many parts of the Middle East. Lamis Khalilová also writes poetry and took part in the Poetry Festival that was held in the Czech Republic last November.

The 17th century Czech philosopher and writer, Jan Amos Komenský – known internationally as Comenius - is one of the best known Czechs of all time. He is most widely celebrated for his progressive and enlightened ideas about education that earned him the epithet “the Teacher of Nations”. But the many other aspects of his thinking - and he was indeed a prolific writer with some 250 books to his name – remain somewhat neglected. This is something that Benjamin Kuras has decided to try to put right, in a small but inspiring book that he has just written

In this week’s Czech Books we look at what is, amazingly, the first anthology of contemporary Czech poetry to be published in English since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The anthology includes six contemporary poets, some of whom were writing under communism – either in exile or what might be termed internal exile. Others are much younger and have been published since the late 1990s. The anthology, called simply “Six Czech Poets”, was edited by Alexandra Büchler, who divides her time between Prague and the United Kingdom and has been responsible

We have featured Mark Corner in this programme before. He has translated several well known Czech works from the first half of the twentieth century, including Vladislav Vancura’s whimsical short novel ‘Summer of Caprice’ and the Czech novel that comes closest to the atmosphere of P.G. Wodehouse, Zdenek Sirotka’s ‘Saturnin’. Now Mark has turned to another writer from the same period, Karel Polacek, and one of his best loved classics, “Bylo nas pet” which Mark has translated as “We Were a Handful”.

It was the literary headline of the year, when Vaclav Havel’s first play for nearly two decades was published a few weeks ago and we can be every bit as sure that the first performance of the play next year at Prague’s Na Vinohradech Theatre, will be a huge event. When Havel became president after the spectacular fall of the communist regime in 1989, many predicted that he would never write again. The new play “Odchazeni” (Leaving) proves them wrong. Not only has Havel shown that he can still write, but he has also drawn directly from his political

It is not often that we have a guest on Czech Books who studied at military academy, but that is the case of our guest today, the novelist, poet and publisher, Martin Reiner, from the Czech Republic’s second city, Brno. We shall be looking not just at Martin’s unusual literary career, but also at his home town’s special relationship to poetry.

The young Czech writer Jiri Sulc recently shot to fame when he won the annual Czech Book Club award for his bestselling novel Dva proti Risi - translating literally as "two against the Reich". The book tells the story of two of the Czechoslovak patriots parachuted to occupied Bohemia and Moravia from London at the height of the Second World War. Their goal was to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich - "the Butcher of Prague". He was the man that Hitler had put in charge of the occupied Czech Lands, and at the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 Heydrich