Czech Books | All stories

Hello and welcome to Czech Books, which this week has a French accent. It would be hard to overstate the very important and longstanding relationship between the Czech and French cultures. Historically many writers and artists such as Alfons Mucha, Toyen and more recently, Milan Kundera, have found a home in France, and the tradition continues today with the translator and writer Patrik Ouředník, whose very powerful and remarkable book, Europeana, we'll be discussing today.

There is a long tradition of poets writing about Prague, such as Jaroslav Seifert and Vítězslav Nezval, and I was interested to find out how contemporary, rapidly changing, Prague has inspired one of the most interesting poets of the younger generation to find new ways to express the spirit of the city. Vít Janota has written a collection called, Praha zničena deštěm or Prague Destroyed by Rain, and its subtitle is Praga caput regni, the ancient Latin motto of the city.

Few writers are more closely identified with Prague than Lenka Reinerová, who died last month at the age of 92. Although in the course of an adventurous life she travelled the world, she loved above all to write about her home city, and with her death Prague has lost one of its most important literary witnesses. In Czech Books this week, we remember Lenka Reinerová and her literary legacy.

Many people know the standard quiz question about who introduced the word "robot" into the language - the answer being the famous Czech author, Karel Čapek. Čapek wrote in the first half of the twentieth century and, amongst many other things, can be considered to be the father of Czech science fiction. Science Fiction and Fantasy are extemely popular in the Czech Republic today and I was interested to find out more about the sci-fi world. So I met with the translator Jan Vaněk Jr., a very active member of the Sci-fi fandom and asked him about the

Věra Chase has had six books published. They include poetry and prose - both short stories and a novel with the intriguing title, “Passion for Peaches”. Věra hails from a Prague literary family and says that she identifies closely with her home city, although she has travelled widely and lived for some time in London. Her grandfather was one of the many journalists thrown out of Czechoslovak Radio after the Soviet invasion of 1968 and the family was deeply mistrusted by the communist regime. Refusing to succumb to stereotype and convention, Věra

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” The opening sentence of Franz Kafka’s story Metamorphosis is one of the most famous in world literature. But the writer himself will always be something of an enigma. Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 and spent nearly all his life in the city, dying at just 41 in a sanatorium near Vienna. A Kafka symposium was recently held in the Czech capital and one of the most interesting talks was given by the US-born Canadian academic, Anthony

Václav Havel led Czechoslovakia to democracy and remains perhaps the best known Czech political figure of modern times. But before spearheading the Velvet Revolution, he was of course a world-renowned playwright. History interrupted Havel’s original career for two decades, but now the former president has returned to drama, with the long-awaited premiere of his new play Leaving taking place in Prague later this month. To discuss the work of Václav Havel, I recently went to New York University to meet academic Carol Rocamora, author of the 2005 book

Welcome to Czech Books - and to Czech slam! Slam poetry first came into being in the United States in the 1980s and is basically a competition between performance poets, who perform their work in front of an audience who then decide who they think did the best job. Slam poetry has become very popular in the Czech Republic in the past few years, with regional competitions in many towns such as Plzeň, the hometown of my guest today, one of the leading Czech slammers - Bohdan Bláhovec. Bohdan is a 23-year-old student at the Prague Film School and

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