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The Czech-born author Jan Novak has won the coveted Magnesia Litera "book of the year" award for his biographical novel about two brothers who fled communist Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s. Ctirad and Josef Masin - sons of a Czech anti-Nazi resistance hero - were part of an anti-communist group of men who shot several policemen dead and killed two StB secret police officers during earlier robberies of arms stores, before escaping to the West. The Masin brothers - who still live in self-imposed exile in the United States - are viewed as killers

The opera cycle "The Ring of the Niebelung" by German composer Richard Wagner based on stories from German mythology takes us into a world of gods, dwarfs, and giants. It was originally intended to be performed as a whole but the cycle is so long and so demanding on the performers, opera houses usually put on only one section a season. But Prague's National Theatre has now decided to present the whole cycle for the first time ever in the Czech Lands.

It was a little bit as if time had stood still. With its 1970s fittings and overall atmosphere, Prague's high-rise Hotel Olympik still has a flavour of the old regime, and it seemed rather an apt venue for a gathering of communist and hard-left parties from around the world. Under a banner pointing to a socialist future in large red letters, several dozen delegates from 32 different countries - mostly in Europe, but also including China, Vietnam and North Korea - came together to discuss the future of socialism in Europe.

After two months of turmoil, Prime Minister Stanislav Gross finally handed in his resignation on Monday morning. Mr Gross had come under extreme pressure, after allegations of irregularities in his personal finances. The three-party government resigned with him, but is due to re-form immediately under a new leader, Jiri Paroubek, up to now the local development minister. But is the crisis that has paralysed Czech politics recently over? And who exactly is Mr Gross's replacement? Pavla Horakova joins me.

Two new anthologies of Czech short stories were released on Wednesday in Prague's, 'Palace Luxor' bookshop. Fittingly for somewhere calling itself the capital's 'Palace of Books', the 'Palace Luxor' played host to the Kings, Queens and Princesses of Czech literature, who had all collaborated on the project. Rosie Johnston was at the event:

The Czech President Vaclav Klaus has found himself embroiled in a huge row with leading members of the European Parliament. Earlier this week two Euro-MPs, including the parliament's deputy president, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, accused Mr Klaus of using unfair means and lies to deceive the Czech public into rejecting the planned European constitution. They warned that he was leading the country into isolation, and they argue that he is the only anti-constitution head of state in the whole union. The Czech President himself has reacted with fury. David

Exports from the Czech Republic grew at a rate above analysts' expectations in 2004. In fact, a new study carried out for the OECD shows the growth in Czech exports was the third fastest in the world last year, behind only China and South Korea. Other new European Union states also showed strong export growth rates, but none matched the success of the Czech Republic in this area. I spoke to Petr Sklenar, an analyst with Atlantik Financial Markets, and began by asking him what was behind this positive trend.

A number of political scientists, sociologists, historians and other academics gathered earlier this week at an international conference in Prague to discuss what democracy means in Europe. The conference was organized by the French Social Science Research Centre and tried to tackle questions like: how important is it to vote? What forms of political representation are most democratic? One of the most interesting parts of the discussion was on the role played by former dissidents in the current political life of those EU member countries that were

At the end of World War II most of Czechoslovakia was liberated from the east by the Red Army, but until the fall of communism, the fact that it was the Americans who liberated the far west of the country was largely ignored. It was sixty years ago this week - on the 18th April 1945 - that General George Patton's 3rd Army entered Czechoslovakia, liberating Western Bohemia from six years of Nazi-German occupation. The largest Czech city they freed was Plzen - about 80 kilometres south-west of Prague - and this year the city is to mark the 60th anniversary

The three parties in the feuding Czech coalition have raised hopes that they will re-unite and form a new government under a different PM. After months of bickering, triggered by a scandal involving PM Stanislav Gross' private finances, the Social Democrats, the Christian Democrats and the Freedom Union appear to have found an acceptable way of easing the embattled PM out of office and getting back to work with pretty much the same team of ministers as before.