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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

In this edition of Czech Books we introduce a completely new piece of Czech writing. A couple of years ago in this programme we featured the Romany writer Ilona Ferkova, one of a handful of authors in this country writing in the Romani language, traditionally spoken by Roma across Europe. When I first met Ilona and her family at their home in the West Bohemian town of Rokycany, they had recently returned from Britain. At the end of the 1990s they had been among the many Czech Romany families, who had gone there to seek asylum. They spent four years

Czech Books comes today from the Cafe Union in Prague's Nusle district, where I'm joined by one of the Czech Republic's most honoured and widely read novelists. Arnost Lustig, born in 1926, was sixteen when he was sent to the Terezin ghetto during the war, and went on to survive Auschwitz. After the war he worked as a journalist, and went on to become a novelist of international reputation. He is still very active as a writer, with all his work strongly influenced by his experiences of the Second World War. His recent novels, "Lovely Green Eyes",

The Museum of Applied Arts in Prague's Old Town houses some impressive collections, including porcelain, jewelry, clocks, furniture and costume. It is one of the city's most popular museums, and its collections bear witness to Central Europe's rich cultural history. But behind each exhibit there is also at least one human story, and a new book, called 'Navraty pameti' or 'bringing back memory' reminds us that these stories can sometimes be tragic. The book maps the several hundred artifacts in the museum's collections that had belonged to Jewish owners