Czech Books | All stories

Lucie Mikolajková is one of the unsung heroes of Czech writing today. She is one of a number of untiring and underpaid translators, working quietly and out of the public gaze to bring Czech literature to English speakers and vice versa. As a literary translator Lucie has taken up some pretty tough challenges. How do you translate Los Angeles Hispanic English into Czech without sounding absurdly artificial or bring the delicacy of lyric poetry from Moravia to English readers without resorting to the sickly sweet? Lucie answers these questions and

Jiří Brdečka is remembered above all for the screenplay of one of the best loved Czech comedies. The 1964 film Limonadový Joe (Lemonade Joe) is a parody of the western; the hero of the title is a teetotal sharpshooter, who turns out to be the Wild West sales rep – with a gift for the one-liner – of a soft drinks company called Kola Loka. The film is full of quirky humour and this is something that we also find in a side of Brdečka’s work that has been neglected since his death over thirty years ago. Perhaps his greatest contribution to cinema are

In communist days, writing inspired by love and passion between people of the same sex was largely taboo, and even today lesbian and gay writing in the Czech Republic tends to be ignored, despite having a long and rich tradition. Things are no better when it comes to translations of lesbian and gay poets and novelists into Czech. But the translator Sylva Ficová is trying to put things right, translating both into Czech and from Czech to English. She tells us more in this week’s Czech Books with David Vaughan.

Thousands of Jewish writers and musicians found their careers cut short by the Holocaust. Tragically, this was the culmination of a long history of persecution and pogroms in many parts of Europe. Lives were destroyed and in many cases people’s work was lost, forgotten or torn from its cultural and linguistic context. Now a major new project is underway to bring to together some of the shattered fragments of this rich legacy of music and theatre. It will culminate in an international festival, Out of the Shadows, which will take place in several

When Sarah Perry’s first novel “After Me Comes the Flood” was published two years ago the reviews in the British press were superlative. Reviewers welcomed the book’s eerie and uncanny qualities, Gothic-smudged, as one critic put it. It is shortly to be followed by a second novel “The Essex Serpent” and now Sarah Perry is on a two-month residency in Prague, this time in search of a peculiarly Central European variant of the Gothic. In Czech Books she talks to David Vaughan.

We have spoken about the poet Ivan Blatný many times on Radio Prague, most recently when Martin Reiner published his award-winning novel about the poet in 2014. Blatný had an extraordinary life. At the age of twenty-nine and already a rising literary star in Czechoslovakia, he took refuge in Britain, just a few weeks after the communists came to power in February 1948. Not long afterwards he had a complete nervous breakdown and he spent most of the next four decades in various hospital and psychiatric institutions in southern England, where he died

Our colleague David Vaughan was quite surprised when a little over two years ago his daughter came home from school and said that she had been invited to the launch of a book written by one of her classmates. Marcela Remeňová was only thirteen when one of the top Czech publishing houses brought out her debut novel, Seznámení – First Acquaintance. This has been followed by a second, a third is on the way and that is even though Marcela has only just passed her sixteenth birthday. The three books will make up a sci-fi trilogy, Osm světů – Eight Worlds

Prague has a long history of inspiring visiting writers. The list includes novelists and poets as diverse as George Eliot, Pablo Neruda and Allen Ginsberg. So it seems apt that the City Library has just launched a programme inviting writers to spend two months absorbing the atmosphere of the city. The first writer-in-residence was the Australian novelist and essayist Liam Pieper and last week, just as his stay was drawing to a close, David Vaughan caught up with Liam and the programme coordinator, Kateřina Bajo.

It is not unusual to come across poets writing in English even if it is not their mother tongue. But for a non-native speaker to write poetry in Czech is rare indeed, and some might say bordering on the masochistic, given the fiendish complexities of the Czech language. But the process can also be very rewarding, both for the poet and the reader. The Romanian poet, Dan Duta has taken up the challenge, as David Vaughan finds out in this week’s Czech Books.

There has been an English-language literary scene in Prague ever since the fall of communism and in Czech Books this week we meet one of its central figures. Thor Garcia’s writings include some vivid and provocative evocations of a seedy, beery and beautiful Prague, to be found in his collection of stories, Only Fools Die of Heartbreak. The book is the focus of his discussion with Pavla Jonssonová.