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Hello and welcome to Czech Books. On 1st December a great new source of information about Czech literature was launched – an English language version of the Czech Literature Portal. I went to visit Viktor Debnár of the Arts Institute in Prague, which is responsible for the project, and Jaroslav Balvín, the portal’s editor, to find out more.

Barbara Day works for a non-profit organization called The Prague Society, promoting international links in business, politics and academia. Twenty-five years ago, Barbara was doing a job that, at least on the surface, seems very similar. Then based in London, she was coordinating visits by Western academics to Czechoslovakia. But times could hardly have been more different. In those days, such initiatives were seen by the communist regime as a subversive activity. Constantly harangued by Czechoslovakia’s secret police – the StB – visiting lecturers, including

Hello and welcome to Czech Books. This week we're discussing the novel The Glass Room, by Simon Mawer, one of this year's nominations for the prestigious Man Booker prize. The novel, which has already been translated into Czech and had a very positive local reception, is inspired by the functionalist masterpiece, the Tugendhat Villa in Brno, and covers over half a century of Czech history, focusing mainly on the fates of the Jewish industrialist Victor Landauer and his wife Liesel. I met with a professor of English Literature at Charles University's

The 78-year-old novelist, Ivan Klíma, is one of the best known and most widely translated of all Czech writers, with novels like “Love and Garbage”, “Judge on Trial” or “No Saints or Angels” acclaimed worldwide. Nearly all Klíma’s work focuses on human relationships, in particular between men and women, but at the same time he offers far broader insights into modern Czech society. In a recent interview for Radio Prague Klíma spoke about his latest book “My Crazy Century” in which he looks back at the first half of his life including his years in

A couple of years ago in this programme we spoke to the young Czech novelist Petra Hůlová about her epic novel of life in contemporary Mongolia, “Paměť mojí babičce“ – which translates literally as “Memory for My Grandmother”. The book has just been published to considerable acclaim in English translation by Northwestern University Press under the title “All This Belongs to Me”. Since writing it back in 2002, Petra has been far from idle, publishing no less than four further novels that take us from inside the mind of an ageing prostitute to the steppes

This week Czech Books met with the writer, feminist and environmental campaigner Eva Hauserová to talk about her novel Cvokyně - or Madwoman - before she left Prague to present it in libraries throughout the country as part of national Book Week. Madwoman tells the story of a time-travelling scientist and uses the science fiction genre to make darkly comic and sardonic comments on Czech society of the 1980s. A newly revised edition of the book was published last month and I first asked Eva to outline its plot.

Unlike most of our guests in Czech Books, Tomáš Sedláček is an economist, and an influential one at that. He is chief economic strategist for one of the major Czech banks. But that does not mean that we are going to be talking about numbers. Instead we shall discuss his new book, “Ekonomie dobra a zla” (The Economics of Good and Evil), which has attracted a great deal of attention in the Czech Republic and, amazingly for a book about economics, has become an instant best-seller.

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

The 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two this week will pass almost unnoticed in the Czech Republic. The reason is simple. For Czechs and Slovaks the tragedy did not begin with the invasion of Poland, but a full year earlier. With the Munich Agreement of September 1938, Britain, France and Italy gave Hitler the green light to annex huge tracts of Czechoslovakia and less than six months later, Nazi troops marched into what was left of the Czech lands unopposed. So how did Hitler get away with bringing a determined and well-defended

One of the things I find most refreshing about Iva Pekárková’s writing is that it is so untypical. Her books have taken us to New York, Nigeria, and now London and Senegal, breaking the stereotype of Czech literature as inward-looking and local. You may remember Iva talking in a past edition of this programme about her autobiographical novel “Dej mi ty prachy”, published in English as “Gimme the Money”, inspired by her experiences as a New York cab driver. After New York, Iva spent several years back in Prague and she also travelled widely in Africa,