In the City of Symbols: Helen Oyeyemi, a London writer at home in Prague

Czech Radio, January 2025

For the last fifteen years Helen Oyeyemi has been living in Prague, where her acclaimed 2024 novel Parasol Against the Axe plays out. The book offers a wonderfully off-centre view of the city and is filled with references to things Czech.

Helen Oyeyemi’s novels sparkle, taking the reader on a roller-coaster ride through the writer’s imagination, with sudden changes of direction, with humour or disaster rearing up when you least expect them. They explore relationships, often between women – mothers and daughters, friends, or lovers.

Helen’s books have tempo. As she says during our conversation: “Somebody somewhere described reading my stories – and I thought it was so much fun – as like having your imagination being pushed by a really intense personal trainer who doesn’t allow you any recovery time.”

In Parasol Against the Axe, the Prague of churches and winding streets filled with tourists is inseparable from the author’s rich literary imagination. The book recently came out in Czech translation, and Czech readers have relished the references to some of the great poets of the Czech language, Karel Jaromír Erben, Vítězslav Nezval or Jan Neruda. But we also stumble across figures of popular Czech culture, from the crooner Karel Gott to the Little Mole of the children’s cartoon. In this book you really do find yourself, as Helen puts it, in an “imagination gym.”

The radio programme that I made with Helen is in Czech. It was built around two interviews recorded with her on the 5^th November (“remember, remember”) 2024. We started at Vyšehrad, the rocky outcrop where the castle of the first dynasty that ruled the Czechs over a thousand years ago once stood. We continued in the warmth of Czech Radio’s studios in Vinohradská Street.

I also spoke to Ladislav Nagy, who translated the book – with great flair – into Czech.

And it’s worth mentioning that the programme also celebrates one of Helen’s favourite instruments, the theremin.

Literature belongs to all of us

Časopis Host, 2023

An interview with the Nobel Prize winning writer, Abdulrazak Gurnah.

Under Four Flags

Hospodařské noviny, April 2022

Guido Lagus was a major figure in the pre-war cultural life of Prague. The German occupation brought his career to an abrupt end, but his life and the life of his family went on. In exile they showed an astonishing resilience and creative energy, which has come down through the generations. The family settled in England, but they never left their Prague roots entirely.

“The English don’t do it that way” – Three generations of a Prague family in London

Czech Radio, 2019

At a hundred Věra Hykšová is brimming with energy. She is also more than a little glamorous. I went to see her just after Christmas at her flat in the leafy London suburb of Richmond. This is no ordinary family. Over seventy years have gone by since Věra left Czechoslovakia. Her daughter Veronika and granddaughter Natasha were both born in London, and yet the family remains proudly Czech. Věra talks to her daughter and granddaughter about her eventful life, and all three talk about what it means to them to be Czech in London.

Hannah Pritchard

September 2018

Hannah Pritchard (1709–68) was one the great English actresses of the eighteenth century, excelling in both tragedy and comedy. On stage she was a pioneer, interpreting important female roles by contemporary playwrights and bringing many Shakespearean roles to life in ways that had never been seen before. Only gradually is her huge contribution to the history of English theatre being appreciated.

An Act of Transgression

Prague Model United Nations, 8th January 2015

Berlin and Prague in November 1989. Address to the Prague Model United Nations (an international conference for high school students).

About Us, Without Us!

Respekt, April 2014

Can we compare Russia’s behaviour in Ukraine with the Munich Crisis of 1938?

Westonia – in my verses I rehearse the truth

November 2012

In her lifetime Elizabeth Jane Weston was better known across Europe than Shakespeare. Known to her many admirers as “Westonia”, Elizabeth was born in England but spent almost all her short life in Bohemia, where she died in 1612. Her grave is still preserved in the cloister of Saint Thomas’s Church in Prague’s Lesser Quarter. In 2012 I organised a series of events to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death.

Václav Havel – a life

Václav Havel grew up in a world of privilege, but it was a world of political engagement, where questions were asked, and where there was constant debate about the central issues of the day.

A Bad State and a Bad Nation

Respekt, January 2010

A review of Mary Heimann’s „Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed“

The Master’s Voice

The Guardian, October 2008

Radio had come of age in Europe, empowering the Nazis by giving a global voice to Hitler, while the BBC’s hand was being forced by Chamberlain.

Articles

Literature belongs to all of us

Časopis Host, 2023

An interview with the Nobel Prize winning writer, Abdulrazak Gurnah.

(Pokračování textu…)

Under Four Flags

Hospodařské noviny, April 2022

Guido Lagus was a major figure in the pre-war cultural life of Prague. The German occupation brought his career to an abrupt end, but his life and the life of his family went on. In exile they showed an astonishing resilience and creative energy, which has come down through the generations. The family settled in England, but they never left their Prague roots entirely.

(Pokračování textu…)

Hannah Pritchard

September 2018

Hannah Pritchard (1709–68) was one the great English actresses of the eighteenth century, excelling in both tragedy and comedy. On stage she was a pioneer, interpreting important female roles by contemporary playwrights and bringing many Shakespearean roles to life in ways that had never been seen before. Only gradually is her huge contribution to the history of English theatre being appreciated.

(Pokračování textu…)

An Act of Transgression

Prague Model United Nations, 8th January 2015

Berlin and Prague in November 1989. Address to the Prague Model United Nations (an international conference for high school students).

(Pokračování textu…)

About Us, Without Us!

Respekt, April 2014

Can we compare Russia’s behaviour in Ukraine with the Munich Crisis of 1938?

(Pokračování textu…)

Westonia – in my verses I rehearse the truth

November 2012

In her lifetime Elizabeth Jane Weston was better known across Europe than Shakespeare. Known to her many admirers as “Westonia”, Elizabeth was born in England but spent almost all her short life in Bohemia, where she died in 1612. Her grave is still preserved in the cloister of Saint Thomas’s Church in Prague’s Lesser Quarter. In 2012 I organised a series of events to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death.

(Pokračování textu…)

Václav Havel – a life

Václav Havel grew up in a world of privilege, but it was a world of political engagement, where questions were asked, and where there was constant debate about the central issues of the day.

(Pokračování textu…)

A Bad State and a Bad Nation

Respekt, January 2010

A review of Mary Heimann’s „Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed“

(Pokračování textu…)

The Master’s Voice

The Guardian, October 2008

Radio had come of age in Europe, empowering the Nazis by giving a global voice to Hitler, while the BBC’s hand was being forced by Chamberlain.

(Pokračování textu…)

Books

Ear

Karolinum Press 2022

I was recently invited to write an afterword to the first English translation of one of the classics of Czech writing from the late 1960s. It is a brilliant book and its author, Jan Procházka, is a much neglected Czech writer.

(Pokračování textu…)

Hear My Voice

2019, Jantar Publishing, London

It is 1938 and Hitler is spreading his poison through Central Europe. With the world’s press corps descending on Prague, a young man from London arrives in the city as an interpreter. His world is shaken as he witnesses dramatic and unsettling events. Germany sucks Austria and then Czechoslovakia into its orbit. As manipulation and distortion become normal, our narrator feels his grip on reality slip away. His job is to translate, yet he finds himself lost for words. Truth will prevail, but whose truth will it be?

(Pokračování textu…)

Catalogue: No Night So Dark

Post Bellum 2020

Catalogue to accompany the exhibition No Night So Dark.

(Pokračování textu…)

Sancta Familia

Triáda 2020

When I visited Colin Wels in Oxford in 2017, he showed me a little book, written and illustrated by his father and uncle as teenagers in Prague in 1938. As I read the manuscript, made up of family conversations and vividly illustrated by the 13-year-old Martin, I was drawn into their world, a world that was to disappear with World War Two and the Holocaust. I worked with the publishers Triáda to bring out a trilingual facsimile edition in Czech, German and English.

(Pokračování textu…)

Battle for the Airwaves

2008, Radioservis and Cook Communications

Battle for the Airwaves looks at the Munich crisis as it played out on the radio stations of Czechoslovakia, Germany, Britain and the United States. Drawing on the extensive and long-forgotten archives of Czech Radio, as well as archives in Germany, Britain and the US, David Vaughan reveals radio’s key role in the run-up to the Munich Agreement and beyond.

(Pokračování textu…)

A Foreign Country

2005, Thames and Hudson

An essay on the legacy of the Lidice massacre of 1942, in Place (eds. Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar, Thames and Hudson, London 2005)

(Pokračování textu…)

Documentaries & Podcasts

In the City of Symbols: Helen Oyeyemi, a London writer at home in Prague

Czech Radio, January 2025

For the last fifteen years Helen Oyeyemi has been living in Prague, where her acclaimed 2024 novel Parasol Against the Axe plays out. The book offers a wonderfully off-centre view of the city and is filled with references to things Czech.

Helen Oyeyemi’s novels sparkle, taking the reader on a roller-coaster ride through the writer’s imagination, with sudden changes of direction, with humour or disaster rearing up when you least expect them. They explore relationships, often between women – mothers and daughters, friends, or lovers.

Helen’s books have tempo. As she says during our conversation: “Somebody somewhere described reading my stories – and I thought it was so much fun – as like having your imagination being pushed by a really intense personal trainer who doesn’t allow you any recovery time.”

In Parasol Against the Axe, the Prague of churches and winding streets filled with tourists is inseparable from the author’s rich literary imagination. The book recently came out in Czech translation, and Czech readers have relished the references to some of the great poets of the Czech language, Karel Jaromír Erben, Vítězslav Nezval or Jan Neruda. But we also stumble across figures of popular Czech culture, from the crooner Karel Gott to the Little Mole of the children’s cartoon. In this book you really do find yourself, as Helen puts it, in an “imagination gym.”

The radio programme that I made with Helen is in Czech. It was built around two interviews recorded with her on the 5^th November (“remember, remember”) 2024. We started at Vyšehrad, the rocky outcrop where the castle of the first dynasty that ruled the Czechs over a thousand years ago once stood. We continued in the warmth of Czech Radio’s studios in Vinohradská Street.

I also spoke to Ladislav Nagy, who translated the book – with great flair – into Czech.

And it’s worth mentioning that the programme also celebrates one of Helen’s favourite instruments, the theremin.

Abdulrazak Gurnah

I interviewed the Nobel Prize winning novelist in August 2022 at his home in Canterbury.  His novels draw the reader into the African experience of colonialism and into the complex lives of people who, through fate or by choice, live in one country but have roots in another.

(Pokračování textu…)

Odesa

Who Does My Language Belong To? This is the title of a documentary I recently made in Czech about the rich and complex relationship between language and national identity. I was motivated to make the documentary after the Russian president claimed the right to Odesa as a Russian city – at the same time as bombing its citizens. In the 1990s this was a place I visited often, and I knew that if anyone did not have the right to claim possession of this wonderful international city on the Black Sea coast of Ukraine, it was Vladimir Putin. The Odesa of Isaac Babel no more belongs to Putin than the city of Kafka to Hitler.

(Pokračování textu…)

No Night So Dark (podcast)

Czech Radio 2021

In seven episodes this podcast tells the story of five generations of a remarkable Czech Jewish family, bringing to life their story in their own words.

(Pokračování textu…)

Alan Hollinghurst

“I have a sort of temperament which oscillates between the frivolous and the rather tragical” is how the British novelist Alan Hollinghurst sums up his approach to writing in an interview that I recorded with him in London in July 2021. Hollinghurst is a master of the English language. His novels are elegant, humorous and rich in literary and musical references, and they are playful in breaking the rules that divide high and low culture. With his literary narrative of gay life in Britain over the last hundred years, Hollinghurst has become one of the most influential British writers of his generation.

(Pokračování textu…)

A Stitch in Time

Czech Radio 2022

I was approached by Leah Gaffen from Class Acts, an initiative that works with bilingual children in the Czech Republic. Leah and her colleagues invited children and teenagers between eleven and eighteen to write a story in English about someone in their family who had inspired them or influenced how they see the world. Our cooperation resulted in the six-part podcast A Stitch in Time.

(Pokračování textu…)

In Their Own Words

Czech Radio 2019-2024

In this podcast I map a hundred years of Czech and Czechoslovak history, as preserved in the Czech Radio archives. We hear presidents and prime ministers, but also hundreds of others whose words – and voices – have come down to us.

(Pokračování textu…)

“The English don’t do it that way” – Three generations of a Prague family in London

Czech Radio, 2019

At a hundred Věra Hykšová is brimming with energy. She is also more than a little glamorous. I went to see her just after Christmas at her flat in the leafy London suburb of Richmond. This is no ordinary family. Over seventy years have gone by since Věra left Czechoslovakia. Her daughter Veronika and granddaughter Natasha were both born in London, and yet the family remains proudly Czech. Věra talks to her daughter and granddaughter about her eventful life, and all three talk about what it means to them to be Czech in London.

(Pokračování textu…)

We Still Breathe Their Air – Roma writing in the Czech Republic

There have been Roma in Europe since the Middle Ages and today they make up one of the continent’s largest minorities. Roma have a rich and ancient oral culture, that has survived in many forms, despite centuries of discrimination and attempts at forced assimilation. Today, across Europe, traditional Romany ways of life are disappearing under the pressures of modern life, but many are turning to writing as a way of preserving and asserting their culture.

(Pokračování textu…)

Lenka Reinerová: A Café With Many Tables

Lenka Reinerová (1916-2008) is often described as Prague’s last writer in German, continuing the tradition of Franz Kafka, Franz Werfel and Egon Erwin Kisch, the last of whom she knew well. Jewish by birth, she survived the war by escaping from France to Morocco, and in the 1950s she was jailed for over a year by Czechoslovakia’s communist authorities. She was the driving force behind the Prager Literaturhaus, set up in 2004 to promote Prague’s German-language literary legacy.

(Pokračování textu…)

Projects & Exhibitions

No Night So Dark

2020–2024, exhibition and podcast

The Wels family was meant to be forgotten, but their story was preserved in a box at the back of a cupboard, including two remarkable books that bring a lost world to life.

(Pokračování textu…)

A Stitch in Time

Czech Radio 2022

I was approached by Leah Gaffen from Class Acts, an initiative that works with bilingual children in the Czech Republic. Leah and her colleagues invited children and teenagers between eleven and eighteen to write a story in English about someone in their family who had inspired them or influenced how they see the world. Our cooperation resulted in the six-part podcast A Stitch in Time.

(Pokračování textu…)

A journey into sound through the archives

When we listen to archive recordings, not only do we hear the words of those who speak, but also the tone of their voice. We travel in time, as voices from the past reach us with an immediacy that can be powerful, moving and sometimes dramatic. Czech Radio has one of the richest and most diverse audio archives in the world, reflecting the complexities of this country’s history. I have often drawn from sound archives in my historical research, in my teaching and in documentaries, radio drama and podcasts.

(Pokračování textu…)

Lidice

A tale of two villages

I first became interested in Lidice in the 1990s when I interviewed Anna Nešporová, who had survived the destruction of the village by the Nazis in 1942. She was one of the strongest people I have ever met and the impressions of that first meeting have always stayed with me. Since then I have returned to Lidice many times as I have tried to understand more of the complex legacy of the massacre.

(Pokračování textu…)

Hannah Pritchard

September 2018

Hannah Pritchard (1709–68) was one the great English actresses of the eighteenth century, excelling in both tragedy and comedy. On stage she was a pioneer, interpreting important female roles by contemporary playwrights and bringing many Shakespearean roles to life in ways that had never been seen before. Only gradually is her huge contribution to the history of English theatre being appreciated.

(Pokračování textu…)

We Still Breathe Their Air – Roma writing in the Czech Republic

There have been Roma in Europe since the Middle Ages and today they make up one of the continent’s largest minorities. Roma have a rich and ancient oral culture, that has survived in many forms, despite centuries of discrimination and attempts at forced assimilation. Today, across Europe, traditional Romany ways of life are disappearing under the pressures of modern life, but many are turning to writing as a way of preserving and asserting their culture.

(Pokračování textu…)

Westonia – in my verses I rehearse the truth

November 2012

In her lifetime Elizabeth Jane Weston was better known across Europe than Shakespeare. Known to her many admirers as “Westonia”, Elizabeth was born in England but spent almost all her short life in Bohemia, where she died in 1612. Her grave is still preserved in the cloister of Saint Thomas’s Church in Prague’s Lesser Quarter. In 2012 I organised a series of events to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death.

(Pokračování textu…)

Václav Havel – a life

Václav Havel grew up in a world of privilege, but it was a world of political engagement, where questions were asked, and where there was constant debate about the central issues of the day.

(Pokračování textu…)

Czech Books – poets

Here are links to programmes with and about poets, featured in my biweekly radio series Czech Books between 2003 and 2019.

(Pokračování textu…)

Czech Books – contemporary prose writers

Here you will find links to programmes with and about some of the best contemporary Czech prose writers, featured in my biweekly radio series Czech Books from 2003 to 2019.

(Pokračování textu…)