Czech Books | All stories

When the translator Ewald Osers died five years ago, it marked the end of an era. This year would have been his hundredth birthday, so with a bit of quick mathematics we can work out that he was already a young adult when the Second World War brought an end to the multi-lingual and uneasily cosmopolitan Prague in which he had grown up. From 1938 until his death, Osers lived in England, where he translated much of the best twentieth century Czech prose and poetry into English. Remarkably, he was translating from his second to his third language,

This week would have been the 90th birthday of Arnošt Lustig, one of the great voices of contemporary Czech fiction, who died in 2011. As a child he survived Auschwitz and the experience was to define his career as a writer. For all the horrors they describe, Lustig’s books are characterized by an overriding humanity, as humour, passion and compassion endure in the most brutalizing of circumstances. Several of his novels, including Night and Hope and A Prayer for Kateřina Horovitzová, have become international bestsellers, and Lustig continued to

Publishers that focus on contemporary writing from Central Europe are few and far between, but they play an important role in bringing Czech poetry and prose to an international audience. One of the newest players is Jantar Publishing, based in London. In just a few years it has established a strong reputation with its beautifully produced translations, several of which we have already talked about here on Radio Prague. As David Vaughan finds out in this week’s Czech Books, Jantar is going from strength to strength with ambitious plans for the

Back in September we broadcast an interview with the award-winning blogger Do Thu Trang. She offers a witty and original take on many aspects of relations between Czechs and the country’s Vietnamese community, seen from the point of view of a second generation Vietnamese Czech. In the week’s Czech Books, we meet Trang again and take a closer look at her writing with David Vaughan.

In recent years the annual Prague Writers’ Festival has done much to promote writing from North Africa and the Middle East in the Czech Republic. This year was no exception, with the award-winning Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud and the Egyptian poet Mohamed Metwalli prominent among the writers taking part. David Vaughan caught up with Mohamed Metwalli to talk about his poetry, the complexities of writing in Egypt today and the pleasures of Prague beer.

You may well have heard of the English princess who became Queen of Bohemia for just one winter, but did you know that it was a Bohemian queen who persuaded Richard II not to burn down London in a fit of rage? Or at least, so the story goes. The historical links between Bohemia and Britain go back a very long way, and have become something of an obsession for the Czech novelist Hana Whitton. She talks about her writing with David Vaughan.

Even though he lives a world away from Prague, the New Zealand poet David Howard was on familiar territory when he visited the Czech Republic this year. In his poetry he has come to this country often over the last decades. Thanks to the Cities of Literature scheme, coordinated by UNESCO, he was able to spend a two-month literary residency in Prague. The encounter of the city of his imagination with the reality proved an inspiration. David Vaughan has more.

This year’s George Theiner Prize, which honours people who have helped to promote Czech literature abroad, went to Markéta Goetz-Stankiewicz. At the University of British Columbia she has devoted decades to promoting, translating and writing about modern Czech literature. It was also thanks to Markéta that many Czech playwrights, banned back home, managed to have their work performed on stages in Canada during the 1970s and ‘80s. She has worked just as hard to promote interest in the rich legacy of German writing from what is now the Czech Republic.

One of the familiar voices that will forever be associated with Czechoslovak Radio belongs to Miloslav Disman, who worked here between 1930 and 1973, and who changed the style of radio broadcasting in this country, with such informal programmes as Okénko (which you just heard a snippet of), and through a radio children’s ensemble, which bears his name to this day.

Milan Kundera is not the only Czech novelist who has chosen to write in French. The writer and painter Lenka Horňáková-Civade has been in France for the last twenty years, living for most of that time with her French husband amid the beautiful countryside of Provence. The landscape and people of the region have inspired her to write several books in Czech, but she decided to write her latest novel directly in French, a language that she only learned as an adult. Paradoxically, the book takes us not to Provence, but to Czechoslovakia, telling the