David Vaughan

In the first part of this series two weeks ago, we went back to 1932 with a recording of memories of Charlotte Garrigue Masaryk, the American wife of Czechoslovakia’s…

There is a magic about radio; it preserves moments in time, fragments of conversation from the past, and as long as these fragments are kept in an archive somewhere, they…

Milan Kundera is not the only Czech novelist who has chosen to write in French. The writer and painter Lenka Horňáková-Civade has been in France for the last twenty years…

Lucie Mikolajková is an unsung hero of Czech writing today. She is one of a number of untiring and underpaid translators, working quietly and out of the public gaze to…

Jiří Brdečka is remembered above all for the screenplay of one of the best loved Czech comedies. The 1964 film Limonadový Joe (Lemonade Joe) is a parody of the western…

In communist days, writing inspired by love and passion between people of the same sex was largely taboo, and even today lesbian and gay writing in the Czech Republic…

Thousands of Jewish writers and musicians found their careers cut short by the Holocaust. Tragically, this was the culmination of a long history of persecution and pogroms…

When Sarah Perry’s first novel “After Me Comes the Flood” was published two years ago the reviews in the British press were superlative. Reviewers welcomed the book’s…

We have spoken about the poet Ivan Blatný many times on Radio Prague, most recently when Martin Reiner published his award-winning novel about the poet in 2014. Blatný had…

Prague has a long history of inspiring visiting writers. The list includes novelists and poets as diverse as George Eliot, Pablo Neruda and Allen Ginsberg. So it seems apt…