One on One | All stories

My guest for One on One this week is Karel Buriánek, the frontman of Czech indie rock band Sunshine. Karel, or Kay as he is known to his fans, has worked in graphic design and fashion in Los Angeles, that’s before settling back in the Czech Republic and focusing on music. Karel has a weekly new music show on Radio Wave, and has just finished a hectic summer’s touring with his band. When I met him on a sunny Prague café terrace, he told me how playing all of this summer’s Czech festivals had been:

My guest for One on One this week is Professor Jaroslav Blahoš, one of the world’s leading endocrinologists. Besides publishing over 370 papers on his specialist subject, Professor Blahoš has also won several prestigious awards. Among other things, he was the only the second Czech after Jan Evangelista Purkyně to be made a member of France’s renowned Académie Nationale de Médecine. He has been head of the Czech Medical Association since 1993 and was president of the World Medical Association from 1999-2001.

Antonín Kratochvíl is one of the greatest contemporary Czech photographers. Known for both his celebrity portraits and photojournalism, he is said to have won World Press Photo awards in more categories than anybody else. Much of his work is informed by his own tough experiences, starting with the Communists’ persecution of his family, who owned a photography studio. At his apartment in New York, where he has been living for three decades, I asked Antonín Kratochvíl when he had first begun to feel his family was being treated harshly.

Before he ever picked up a camera, the internationally renowned Czech photographer Antonín Kratochvíl led a colourful life to say the least. After escaping from Czechoslovakia in 1967, he spent time in an Austrian refugee camp, was imprisoned in Sweden and joined the French Foreign Legion, with whom he fought in a war before later deserting. In the second part of an interview conducted at his long-term home in New York, Antonín Kratochvíl discusses, among other things, how his own experiences have shaped his approach to photography.

My guest today on One on One is Vit Havránek, head of the Tranzit Display gallery in Prague. Vit opened up this space for contemporary art last November, after working for many years at the National Gallery in Prague. He publishes and edits books of young Czech artists’ work, and has been charged with amassing one of the biggest collections of Central European art today by the Austrian bank Erste. I met him in the café of his new gallery to ask him a bit about the way he used the space:

My guest for One on One this week is the leading chef Andrea Accordi (31). Earlier this year, this Italian native caused a stir in culinary circles when his Allegro Restaurant in Prague became the first eatery in the former Eastern bloc to win a Michelin star. When I met up with Andrea in his busy restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel, I started by asking him what it took to become a Michelin-standard chef:

Peter Bisek and his wife Vera edit and publish the leading Czech and Slovak newspaper in the United States, Americké listy. Mr Bisek is also the president of the Bohemian Citizens' Benevolent Society, which runs the popular Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in the New York borough of Queens. It was in the Bohemian Hall that Peter Bisek outlined the past and present of the bi-weekly, Czech-language newspaper.

My guest for this edition of One in One is Rachael Weiss, an Australian writer who has recently published a book called ‘Me, Myself and Prague’. As the title suggests, it sums up in a very amusing way, what it is like for a foreigner to come and live in the Czech Republic without knowing the people or the language. When I met with Rachael, I first asked her what made her come to Prague.

On Saturday 32-year-old long-distance swimmer Yvetta Hlaváčová completed the last leg of a 142 kilometre swim up the Vltava River, becoming the only Czech woman to have ever conquered the Vltava against the current. Hundreds cheered her on from the shore as she approached the finish line after 35 hours over seven days, an accomplishment to be set in the Guinness Book of World Records. Prior to the week-long marathon, we had a chance to speak to Yvetta for One on One, taped at Prague’s Žluté Lázně. We discussed the Vltava challenge as well as her

The Archdiocese Caritas Prague is one of the three biggest charity organizations in the Czech Republic. Every year, it spends some 70 million crowns, or almost 5 million US dollars, on various projects around the world in countries such as Belarus, India, Zambia and Uganda. Our guest today in One on One is Jitka Škovránková who has recently returned from Uganda where she headed the project of a Czecho-Slovak hospital in the town of Buikwe.