David Vaughan

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…

It is not unusual to come across poets writing in English even if it is not their mother tongue. But for a non-native speaker to write poetry in Czech is rare indeed, and…

In the course of a life that spanned over 90 years, the writer and translator Heda Margolius Kovály survived the very worst that the twentieth century could bring: first…

Much has been written about Prague as a literary city, as a place that has spurred the imagination of writers. Usually the focus is on the myths of “Magic Prague” from the…