Czech Books | All stories

We have featured plenty of contemporary Czech novelists in this programme over the last decade, but we should spare a thought for their translators, patiently working at home alone, struggling at a craft every bit as challenging as alchemy. In Czech Books this week, David Vaughan talks to a translator who has done more than any other to bring the middle and younger generation of Czech novelists to English-speaking readers.

When the Slovak writer Pavol Rankov published his novel “It Happened on September the First (or Whenever)” in 2009, it came just after the Slovak national football team had beaten the Czech Republic. In an enthusiastic review, one Czech critic suggested that the same had now happened in literature and that the Rankov’s literary achievement had put his Czech contemporaries to shame. When the author came to Prague earlier this week, David Vaughan took the opportunity to talk to him about a remarkable novel that speaks volumes about a part of the world

Born in 1946, Aleš Macháček, has been through experiences that it is hard for people from the west to imagine. In 1977 he was sentenced to three years in prison for helping to distribute books and periodicals that were banned by the regime in Czechoslovakia, and in 1985 he was bullied into exile in London, as part of a secret police campaign to get rid of troublesome dissidents. That was where he met his partner, Jane Kirwan. Today they live in Prague, in a flat above an old cinema built by Aleš’s grandparents nearly a century ago. All this has

Jaroslav Hašek is known the world over for his epic satirical novel, “The Good Soldier Švejk”. It tells of the adventures of a Czech soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, drawing richly from the author’s own experiences. But Hašek was also a prolific writer of short stories. Even though he died before his fortieth birthday, he produced nearly fifteen hundred stories, and we can now enjoy a selection of these in English in a new translation by Mark Corner. David Vaughan reports.

If you have ever wondered about how 19th century Czech settlers lived on the Great Plains of the American Midwest, there is no better way to find out than by reading the novels of Willa Cather. David Vaughan looks at the Bohemian side of a classic American novelist who is surprisingly little known here in the Czech Republic.

Czech parents may well be relieved to know that, if the latest studies are anything to go by, their children are still keen readers. And what are they reading? Well, how about Psycho for Kids and Baby Punk…? Such is the rich new world of Czech children’s writing and publishing, post-1989. It’s a world where poetry, music and visual art have come to overlap with some surprising results. In reaction to four decades of censorship, just about anything goes and there is little nostalgia for the old days. The journalist Kateřina Kadlecová has taken a

This year is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Canadian historian Gordon Skilling. As we have already reported on Radio Prague, the anniversary has been marked by an international conference and an exhibition at Prague’s Kampa Museum, a rare honour for an academic. But Gordon Skilling was different. Between 1937 and his death in 2001, he was in Prague or Bratislava for many of the most important moments in 20th century Czechoslovak history, and this gave him a very close and personal relationship to the Czechs and Slovaks. David Vaughan

When a Czech poet goes on a reading tour of the United States, it can sometimes have unexpected consequences. For Sylva Fischerová the result was a book that offers some unusual and very personal insights into the similarities and differences between the two continents and into the nature of writing itself. David Vaughan reports.

In Czech Books this week, David Vaughan meets the poet and novelist, Olga Walló. In recent years she has become something of a literary phenomenon in the Czech Republic, even though she was over fifty when her first novel was published in 1998. Prior to that, she was better known as a translator and dubbing director, a career which she describes as a form of “inner emigration” from communism. Her novels are strongly autobiographical and Václav Havel has described them as a way of “tracing the path which our nation travelled not so long ago.”

Any history of Czechoslovakia’s dissident movement in the 1970s will include more than a passing reference to the writer, editor and translator Paul Wilson. Originally from Canada, he came to the country in 1967, then in his twenties, and he was to stay for ten years, eventually being expelled in 1977 for associating with dissidents and the underground music scene. Paul Wilson was back in Prague last month for the launch of a collection of his essays about this country over the last three decades. He spoke to David Vaughan.