One on One | All stories

Professor Lubomír Doležel, who was born in the Moravian village of Lesnice in 1922, is an internationally respected academic best known for his pioneering work in literary theory and linguistics. After three years at the University of Michigan in the second half of the 1960s, he was invited to the University of Toronto, where he established the study of Czech language and literature. On Friday Professor Doležel received the Czech Foreign Ministry’s Gratias Agit prize for promoting the good name of his native country.

Earlier this month four professional Czech skiers set out for the trip of a lifetime: skiing some of the steepest peaks in the world in Thompson Pass, Alaska. The team included former world skicross champion Tomáš Kraus, Olympian snowboarder Michal Novotný, snowboarder Martin Černík, and freeride skier Robin Kaleta. For seven days or so the four tackled some of the toughest faces in the area for a short documentary.

Kryštof Hádek first made waves nearly a decade ago when he played a fresh-faced young pilot in the World War II drama Dark Blue World. Since then the Prague-born actor has appeared in films of varying quality, though he has recently been enjoying a purple patch; Hádek won a Czech Lion award for his part in the acclaimed 3 Seasons in Hell, and was acknowledged as one of European cinema’s new talents when he was invited to this year’s Berlin Film Festival as one of its “Shooting Stars”.

Joe Karafiát is a songwriter and guitarist with the legendary Czech underground rock band the Plastic People of the Universe. Karafiát, who has also played with groups like Garage and his own Joe Carnation Band, had first met the Plastic People’s Vratislav Brabenec in the 1980s when the two were living in exile in Canada, but didn’t become a member himself until 1997. When I met Joe Karafiát (53) in Prague last week, we first discussed his beginnings as a musician.

The Czech Film and Television Academy, or FAMU, has been educating filmmakers for over 60 years. Among its students were such personalities of Czech and international cinema as Miloš Forman, Jiří Menzel, Agneiszka Holland and Jan Svěrák. In this edition of One on One we talk to Pavel Jech, the dean of the famed film school. Pavel Jech was born in Prague but grew up in the United States, where his parents moved after 1968, when he was only two months old. After graduating in history at Columbia University in New York, Pavel Jech returned to Prague

German journalist and historian Andreas Wiedemann is the author of a book about the resettlement of the Sudetenland following the expulsion of the German population at the end of World War II. The title translates from German as ‛Come with us to the borderland: resettlement and new settlers in the former Sudetenland 1945-1952.’ Unlike the expulsion, the resettlement has been given scant coverage although the consequences still scar large parts of the country. I asked him why he seized upon the subject.

The Irish poet Justin Quinn has been living in the Czech Republic for close to two decades. His latest collection of poetry, “Waves and Trees” has been translated into Czech, and he himself has also translated the work of Czech poets, such as Petr Borkovec, into English. I talked to Justin Quinn about translating poetry and how living away from his native country has affected the poetry he writes.

Anna Kareninová is a leading Czech literary translator and editor who also does the subtitles for a lot of the films that appear on the country’s cinema and TV screens. Many viewers would no doubt imagine that Anna Kareninová is a nom de plume, as it is the Czech version of Anna Karenina, the heroine of the Tolstoy novel of the same name. In fact, she told me at Prague’s Café Slavia, the name was assumed, not by her but by her father, after he fled from Russia in 1917.

In this week’s One on One I talk to Chinese Human rights activist Harry Wu. He survived 19 years in Chinese prison camps. Released during a thaw in 1979, he was later invited to the United States where he became a citizen. There he has devoted himself to uncovering details of the Chinese labour camp system, risking a fresh term in the camps when he went back to China in 1995. On the sidelines of a conference in Prague about communist crimes, I asked him what he had been able to find out about the Chinese camp system.

My guest on One on One is hair-stylist Mark Weston. When I visited his one-seat Salon Trichomania on Prague’s Anglická Street, he told me what brought him from his native country of England and his second home-town of Hamburg, Germany, to the Czech Republic. We talked about the hairstyles Czechs prefer and how that is changing but I began by asking him how he got interested in cutting and coloring hair in the first place.