One on One | All stories

Robert Maclean is editor-in-chief of the Central and Eastern European Construction and Investment Journal, a publication he helped set up in 1995. He had already been living in Prague for some years at that point, having “caught the bug” while reporting from the region in the late 1980s. When we met at his office on Wenceslas Square we discussed how the construction industry here has changed in the last two decades, and whether property in the Czech Republic represents a good investment. But I first asked Maclean what had drawn him to the field

The Botanicus chain of stores offering herbal soaps, extracts and delicacies is a Czech, and growing international, success story. Most tourists will have probably bought something from one of their outlets in the country. The small business was founded in the early 1990’s after the restitution of a family farm around 40 kilometres north-east of Prague. That has become the centre for the business and a tourist attraction with more than 50,000 visitors a year. One of the firm’s co-founders Dana Hradecká explained the roots of the original inspiration

Jana Zielinski is the director of Designblok, a Prague-based festival that brings together designers from the Czech Republic and abroad. What started 12 years ago as a small event targeted at design professionals, has blossomed into Prague’s biggest design festival, attracting 30,000 visitors last year. I spoke to Zielinski about her love for design, how the festival started and her plans for the future.

Scottish writer Iain Banks is a prolific novelist of conventional novels and science fiction. Since his first novel, “The Wasp Factory” was published in 1984, he has penned around a dozen conventional novels. Under the pen name Iain M Banks he has published around half that number of science fiction books. Many of these feature a utopian civilization of the future called “The Culture.” Away from the writing, Mr. Banks takes a public political stand on many issues, for example he tore up his passport and mailed it to the prime minister in protest

Ahead of the Czech general elections, the Prague-based American Chamber of Commerce, or Amcham, came up with an initiative to curb corruption and to reform Czech public procurement legislation. The main Czech political parties welcomed the initiative and committed to implementing the proposed reform in Parliament. On Monday, with negotiations about the new government in full swing, Radio Prague spoke to Amcham’s executive director Weston Stacey, and asked him whether he thought corruption had been an important issue for Czech voters.

Among the small beer producers presenting their wares at the Czech Beer Festival currently on in Prague is the Zhůřák brewery, which is run by Chris Baerwaldt. He moved to the Czech Republic from the US, and produces wheat beers and ales at his home near the small west Bohemian town of Zhůř. When we met just before the Czech Beer Festival, I asked Baerwaldt what had brought him to this country in the first place.

Jan Herzmann is a managing partner in one of the top Czech polling agencies, Factum Invenio. While most of the work is marketing surveys for companies, the current workload is spiced up by polls and surveys ahead of lower house elections at the end of next week. I asked Mr. Herzmann about the special characteristics of polling in the Czech Republic and how he came to be in the forefront of moves to re-launch political opinion polls after more than 40 years of Communism.

My guest in One on One is Tomáš Škrdlant. With more than sixty films to his name, covering over thirty years, Tomáš is one of the Czech Republic’s foremost documentary film makers. Much of his work has focused on the lives of people living on the margins of society: sometimes because of disability, sometimes old age, or simply because they are different. This ties in with a second thread that runs through his films: our complex relationship to the world around us, how we identify with the place we live and its ecology. When I visited Tomáš Škrdlant

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.