One on One | All stories

Jana Kománková runs Proti šedi (which translates as “against the grey”), a highly useful one-stop website for anybody interested in arts events in Prague. She has been a well-known name in local alternative music circles since the early 1990s, as a deejay with Radio 1 and a critic with numerous magazines and newspapers. Remarkably the Prague-born Kománková began reviewing concerts for Rock & Pop at only 17. When we met at a café, I asked her how she’d managed to launch her career at such an early age.

During WWII, the London-based Czechoslovak government in exile had only one method of communicating regularly with its people at home: over the airwaves of the BBC. To discuss the content of these programmes, ministers’ broadcasting skills, coded messages to the resistance and much more, I recently caught up with academic Erica Harrison, who has conducted ground-breaking research into the subject. My first question: How much broadcasting did the exile government actually do?

Dr. Irena Edwards is the head of the Czech National Trust, a UK-based organisation that supports conservation in the Czech Republic. Dr. Edwards left Prague at a young age and continued her law career in Britain, where she became a high flier in the corporate world. Her dual qualification meant she was much in demand when the Iron Curtain came down and she spent much of the 1990s helping UK firms get a foothold in her now democratic native country.

As Czech Radio’s correspondent in London, Jiří Hošek is for many of his compatriots one of their main sources of news from Great Britain. When we met recently at the bustling St Pancras train station, our conversation took in everything from listeners’ perceptions of the UK to the challenges of working alone. But I first asked Hošek – who has been in London for three years – what kind of stories his editors in Prague were typically interested in.

Jantar Publishing is a London-based press that brings translated titles from Central and Eastern Europe to a broader international audience. So far all of its releases have been Czech, ranging from Karel Jaromir Erben’s classic 19th century poem Kytice (The Bouquet) to a novel by Michal Viewegh that was a huge hit in the original. The man behind Jantar Publishing is Michael Tate, an Englishman who has in the past lived in Prague. When we met at the British Library last month, I asked Tate what had led him to launch the company five or six years

You may not know the name Zuzana Jungmannová but there’s a good chance you’ve seen her face. It appeared in great detail in the striking photorealist painting Zuzana in Paris Studio, for which her artist boyfriend Hynek Martinec was a winner in the UK’s national Portrait Awards in 2007. The pair now live in London, where Jungmannová runs the flourishing Czech School Without Borders, a real hub of the city’s Czech community. When we met, I first asked her how she had ended up in the UK capital.

Professor Jan Marek is a lead consultant in paediatric and prenatal cardiology at London’s famous Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. One of the top specialists in his field in the world, Professor Marek worked for many years at Motol Hospital in Prague and retains close ties to the institution. I recently caught up with him at his office at Great Ormond St. – and before he was called away to conduct a heart operation – began by asking him how he had ended up at such a prestigious institution.

Tomáš Bísek spent 11 years as a clergyman in Scotland before returning to his native Prague in the mid-1990s. An early signatory of the Charter 77 protest document, the Protestant cleric had been a victim of Operation Asanace (Clearance), under which the Communists used mental and physical pressure to force dissidents to leave Czechoslovakia. Mr. Bísek had studied in the US and – in the second half of a two-part interview – told me the secret police may have expected him to return there rather than opting for Scotland in 1985.

Protestant cleric Tomáš Bísek was forced to leave Czechoslovakia in the 1980s for his dissident activities and spent over a decade ministering in Scotland. His family had been active members of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren and – despite the communist regime – he himself had eventually become a clergyman in a small town in the Bohemian Moravian Highlands. However, his life became increasingly difficult after he and his wife signed the Charter 77 protest document. I began the first half of a two-part interview by asking the now retired

Among the most important guests at this year’s Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival was Laurent Becue-Renard, who shared his expertise with local documentarians at an Ex Oriente Film workshop. Becue-Renard’s first film War-Wearied, about Bosnian women coping with the aftermath of conflict, was screened before the masterclass. But when we met, I wanted to discuss his most recent work, Of Men and War.