Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100Tue, 28 Jul 2026 04:31:02 +0200https://english.radio.cz/hospital-and-poet-god-linguist-teaches-us-breathe-8235717© 2026 Radio Prague InternationalWe 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 an extraordinary life. At the age of twenty-nine and already a rising literary star in Czechoslovakia, he took refuge in Britain, just a few weeks after the communists came to power in February 1948. Not long afterwards he had a complete nervous breakdown and he spent most of the next four decades in various hospital and psychiatric institutions in southern England, where he died in 1990. It was while he was in Saint Clement’s Psychiatric Hospital in Ipswich in the late 1970s and early 1980s that his poetic career saw a remarkable second flowering, with the publication of two influential and highly original collections. The hospital’s link to Ivan Blatný had been all but forgotten in Britain, but this has changed thanks to the writer Julie Garton. We find out why in Czech Books as she talks to David Vaughan and the translator Eva Kalivodová about her award-winning literary essay devoted to Ivan Blatný.encr@radio.cz (Cesky Rozhlas)webmaster@radio.cz (CRo Webmaster) https://english.radio.cz/sites/default/files/images/blatny_ivan_0.jpg?timestamp=1600252375 https://english.radio.cz/hospital-and-poet-god-linguist-teaches-us-breathe-8235717 Radio Prague International Radio Prague International radio.prague.int@gmail.com clean 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9