One on One | All stories

As managing partner for the central and southeast Europe region for the global accounting giant Ernst & Young, Magdalena Souček has frequently topped lists of the most influential women in Czech business. With her doctor parents coming and going from Czechoslovakia, she spent part of her childhood and youth in Western Europe before studying in the U.S. and beginning her career there with Arthur Andersen. But when Communism fell in her native country, she soon returned to set up a Czech branch of the firm – at a time when even basic amenities were

The sultry voice of young Sara Vondrášková there in the song Lay Down, which has launched her from the cafes and clubs of Prague to the silver screen, as the title song for the new Czech film noir Ve Stínu. The jazz student’s bewitching contralto and modern compositional sensibility is giving her some well earned prominence in the next generation of singer/songwriter/composers. Our guest in this edition of One on One, Sara Vondrášková tells us first of all how she’s begun to move away from her home ground in jazz.

A long-time resident of Prague, Doug Arellanes has been involved in internet innovations in this country since the early 1990’s. A few years ago, he became one of the founders of Sourcefabric, an organization that creates open-source online tools for media organizations all over the world. Douglas began by telling me about how he was first enticed to come to Czechoslovakia from Los Angeles, having received a letter from his friends who at the time founded the newspaper Prognosis, the precursor to The Prague Post.

Marie Gabánková is a noted portrait artist, painter and teacher. She was born in Ostrava and left Czechoslovakia with her family shortly after the Soviet invasion of 1968, aged just seventeen. She has lived in Canada ever since and has had a book of her works published in England, and had such noted figures as singer-songwriter Karel Kryl and writer Josef Škvorecký sit down for portraits. When I met up with her I began by asking Marie what memories she has of her youth in Czechoslovakia.

Anyone who has been to Prague is extremely likely to have seen some of the work of artist Jiří Votruba. Posters, postcards and t-shirts bearing his distinctive brightly-coloured images of Franz Kafka, the Golem, and Prague landmarks are on sale throughout the city. Indeed, they themselves help form the image of the Czech capital for many visitors.

Michal Kašpárek is the perfect guide to the Czech Republic’s second city Brno. A life-long resident, he has in recent years used his extensive knowledge of the Moravian capital to write a very useful alternative e-book entitled Poznej Brno (Get to Know Brno), while he is also behind the English language listings site BrnoNow.com. When we met for a drink recently outside a café in the lively Veveří district, I began by asking Kašpárek what was distinctive about Brno people.

Jeff Vanderziel heads the Department of English and American Studies at Masaryk University in Brno. His association with the university actually goes all the way back to 1989, when he worked there in the dying days of Communism. He took over at the English department a couple of years later – and has seen many changes over the past two decades.

Gisela Cheffer was born Gisela Duschinský in Brno in 1932. Her Viennese father was Jewish, which made her a target for the Nazis, and her baptism as a Roman Catholic very likely saved her life. She later came close to being forced to leave during the mass expulsion of Czechoslovakia’s German population after the war. But she stayed – until, that is, a meeting with a Finn led to a life abroad.

One of the more colourful news stories out of the Czech Republic last year concerned Corrupt Tour, which started running excursions – in Czech, English and German – to sites linked to graft. These include the villas of dodgy businessmen, Prague City Hall and the spot where the city’s “Olympic centre” was projected to stand.

How are Czech newspapers dealing with the shift to an online world? Is their present, mainly free model sustainable? And what will the media landscape look like in a decade? One person well placed to discuss these and similar questions is Lucie Tvarůžková. She is the boss of iHNed, the news website of the leading Czech financial daily Hospodářské noviny, whose data journalism team recently won a prestigious award.