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This week Václav Havel, who died in 2011, would have turned 80 and events in his honour are being held around the country. Some will celebrate his works as a playwright, others his importance as a dissident and later as the country’s first post-communist president.

When Czechoslovak dissidents produced samizdat literature in the late communist period they did so in large part thanks to the material and financial support of the Charter 77 Foundation. It was run by František Janouch, a Czech émigré who is still mainly based in Sweden. In the second half of a two-part interview with the nuclear scientist, we discussed his relationship with Václav Havel, the Velvet Revolution and the work of the Charter 77 Foundation today. But first I asked Mr. Janouch, now 85, how the organisation had managed to get printers

A number of events are being planned to mark what would have been the 80th birthday of Václav Havel. On the actual anniversary of the late playwright and president’s birth on October 5 a gathering is set to take place on Prague’s Wenceslas Square, while 80 figures from public life and the arts world are set to appear on four stages at a tribute at the city’s Lucerna Palace on October 15. Meanwhile the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation in the US will present Burmese writer Ma Thida with its first annual Disturbing the Peace Award at the Bohemian National Hall in New York on Wednesday.

This year’s George Theiner Prize, which honours people who have helped to promote Czech literature abroad, went to Markéta Goetz-Stankiewicz. At the University of British Columbia she has devoted decades to promoting, translating and writing about modern Czech literature. It was also thanks to Markéta that many Czech playwrights, banned back home, managed to have their work performed on stages in Canada during the 1970s and ‘80s. She has worked just as hard to promote interest in the rich legacy of German writing from what is now the Czech Republic.

A plaza by the National Theatre in Prague is to be renamed after the late president Václav Havel, but it is not clear what form the name will take, Lidovky.cz reported on Thursday. While City Hall’s topographical commission is in favour of calling the space Havel Square (Havlovo náměstí), councilor Jan Wolf is lobbying for Václav Havel Square (náměstí Václava Havla), the news website said. Mayor Adrian Krnáčová told Lidovky.cz that it was a sufficiently dignified place to bear Mr. Havel’s name, given its proximity to the National Theatre and Národní St., where the Velvet Revolution began in 1989.

An exhibition of caricatures of Václav Havel opened at Prague’s Malostranská Beseda on Tuesday evening to mark the 80th anniversary of the late Czech president’s birth. The exhibition, called “World Draws Havel”, includes some eighty portraits by caricaturists from 30 countries. It will be on display throughout September.

Cartoons of former Czech president, dissident and playwright Vaclav Havel by authors from around the world are displayed at an exhibition currently on show in Prague's Malostranská beseda. The exhibition, entitled, the World Draws Havel, was organized by the Czech Cartoonists' Union. Of the 80 cartoons on display around 50 are by Czech authors.

Foundation Charter 77 has started raising money for a bell to honour the late president Václav Havel on the fifth anniversary of his death in December of this year. The Bell for Havel project will send thirty small bells around the world bearing a message of remembrance and gratitude. They will eventually return to Prague to be sold in an auction. The money raised, together with contributions from individuals, will be used to cast a bell named Václav which will be placed at the Church of St. Havel in downtown Prague. I asked Evžen Hart from Foundation

Struck as a PhD student by the philosophical language used by Václav Havel in his famous 1990 speech to the US Congress, Aviezer Tucker went on to write The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patočka to Havel. More recently Tucker, whose wife is Czech, has turned his attention to what really happened when communism fell at the end of the 1980s. We discussed his latest book The Legacies of Totalitarianism – and his call for a new kind of dissident today – when the Israeli-born political philosopher visited our studios recently. But

A boulevard in Kiev will probably be named after former Czech president and playwright Václav Havel, the news site ukranews reported on Wednesday. Kiev city hall has launched a public poll to find a new name for a street which is currently named after the Bolshevik revolutionary Ivan Lepse. So far “Havel’s Boulevard” is heading the public poll with over 3,000 votes out of 5,429 cast. On the other hand, some 2,000 people expressed their opposition to changing the street name.