Czech Books | All stories

Czech history features many brave, pioneering women, such as the author Božena Němcová (1820-1862) or the politician Milada Horáková (1901-1950). But Czech society today is still very far from offering equality of opportunity. I met with Eva Kalivodová to discuss the work she does in the field of gender and culture. Eva teaches literature at Charles University, is a scholar of Gender Issues and edits a bi-lingual literary and cultural journal focusing on gender in the Czech context, One Eye Open/Jedním Okem. I first asked Eva if she thought the

When Ivan Klíma was a little boy, he knew he wanted to be a writer. Today, he is one of the most respected figures of Czech literature. Ivan Klíma’s life journey included years in a Nazi concentration camp, membership in the communist party, and later a life on the fringe of the society, after he was expelled from the party and joined Czechoslovakia’s opposition movement. In his latest book, My Crazy Century, Ivan Klíma explains what happened that he found himself in the ranks of the communist party, a totalitarian and criminal organization that

If you are a writer from one of the smaller countries of Europe, writing in a language spoken by a few million or perhaps just a few hundred thousand people, your chances of finding an international readership are almost non-existent. The organization Literature Across Frontiers has been working to redress the balance, helping to draw attention to writers from all corners of the continent, and above all struggling to get their work published and translated internationally. At the recent Bookworld book fair in Prague, the driving force behind the

The 1980s was the last decade of communist rule in Czechoslovakia. Political oppression at that time was not as fierce as in the beginning of the totalitarian regime in the 1950s, but still there was no end in sight. Society was demoralized and constantly bullied by the authorities, people mostly cared about themselves more than anything else, and bureaucracy permeated every aspect of life. In short, not a happy time. One of the very few Americans living here in those days was Marsha Kocábová, who came to Prague in 1982. Her book ‘Neither Here nor

Wolves in Poland, Shakespeare in Japan and the pitfalls of literary translation. These are just three of the many subjects that came up when I visited to the Bookworld international book fair in Prague last week. Bookworld is a huge and diverse event, by far the biggest of its kind in the Czech Republic. It would be impossible to cover everything that was going on, even during the few hours that I was there, but here at least is a taste of the event.

This week Czech Books met with a relatively new, but highly praised writer of prose and poetry, Josef Straka. The way in which Straka describes his experience of modern life, particularly city life, could be considered to be very postmodern in its fascination with the peripheral and the fragmentary. Originally from Jablonec nad Nisou in the north he is now based in Prague, though likes nothing better than to make long walks around the margins of other European cities, seeking out fragments of real life, what he calls ‘small miracles’, and living

Less than six months ago, a disastrous fire reduced an entire wing of Prague’s historic Industrial Exhibition Hall to a pile of twisted metal and masonry, but the building has made a remarkable recovery. In a few days’ time it will be housing the Czech Republic’s biggest annual book fair, Svět knihy or Bookworld, which will be taking place for the fifteenth year running, and seems remarkably unscathed either by the fire or the rages of the world economic crisis. To find out more, I managed to steal a few minutes with the busy and energetic Bookworld

This week Czech Books is looking at the novel Mrchopěvci, or Gravelarks, the first novel by the hugely accomplished polymath and polyglot author Václav Pinkava, who wrote - amongst others - under the pen name Jan Křesadlo. Pinkava was born in Prague in 1926 and emigrated to Britain in 1969 where he worked as a clinical psychologist in Colchester. Gravelarks was his first novel, written during his early retirement; it was hailed by author Josef Škvorecký as "one of the most original, shocking, truthful works of contemporary Czech fiction" and was

In less than three weeks time the results of the biggest literature prize in the Czech Republic, the Magnesia Litera, will be announced and excitement has been rising since the announcement of the nominated books last month. The prize is unusual in that it has nine different categories including, apart from fiction and poetry, books for young readers, non-fiction and best translation. As well as winners in each category an overall "best book" is also chosen. Given the vast number of books under consideration, judging the competition is a mammoth

If you live in Prague, it is quite likely that you will have encountered Jaroslav Rudiš as a rock musician, performing with gloom and late ‘70s angst with Jaromír 99 and the Bombers or his own band U-Bahn. Novelist, playwright, screenplay writer and musician, Rudiš is a man of many talents, and in recent years he has acquired something of a cult following on the Czech literary scene. If you want to know a bit more about Jaroslav, a good place to start is with his Facebook or MySpace profile: there you’ll find out that he’s straight, going on 37,