David Vaughan

How do you write poetry in the age of the tweet? Tomáš Míka has an answer. His latest collection is called Text Messages: it doesn’t go quite so far as to reduce…

Few pieces of music could be said to capture the spirit of the Czech landscape more vividly than Bedřich Smetana’s symphonic cycle, Má vlast – My Homeland. The cycle is…

In a Europe of growing nationalism, Marie Iljašenko is a young Czech poet who defies categorization. She was born in Kiev into a family with both Ukrainian and Polish…

Bronislava Volková is a woman of many talents. She has had numerous collections of her poetry published and translated into no less than eleven languages, at the same time…

When the translator Ewald Osers died five years ago, it marked the end of an era. This year would have been his hundredth birthday, so with a bit of quick mathematics we…

This week would have been the 90th birthday of Arnošt Lustig, one of the great voices of contemporary Czech fiction, who died in 2011. As a child he survived Auschwitz and…

Publishers that focus on contemporary writing from Central Europe are few and far between, but they play an important role in bringing Czech poetry and prose to an…

Back in September we broadcast an interview with the award-winning blogger Do Thu Trang. She offers a witty and original take on many aspects of relations between Czechs…

In recent years the annual Prague Writers’ Festival has done much to promote writing from North Africa and the Middle East in the Czech Republic. This year was no…

George Brady, who is 88, currently finds himself at the centre of one of the most divisive political affairs seen in the Czech Republic in some time. Amid the hullabaloo…