
Literature belongs to all of us
Časopis Host, 2023
An interview with the Nobel Prize winning writer, Abdulrazak Gurnah (in Czech translation).
Časopis Host, 2023
An interview with the Nobel Prize winning writer, Abdulrazak Gurnah (in Czech translation).
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.
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 (1709–68) was one the great English actresses of the eighteenth century, excelling in 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.
Respekt, April 2014
Can we compare Russia’s behaviour in Ukraine with the Munich Crisis of 1938?
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 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.
Respekt, January 2010
A review of Mary Heimann’s „Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed“
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.
Časopis Host, 2023
An interview with the Nobel Prize winning writer, Abdulrazak Gurnah (in Czech translation).
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.
Hannah Pritchard (1709–68) was one the great English actresses of the eighteenth century, excelling in 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.
Respekt, April 2014
Can we compare Russia’s behaviour in Ukraine with the Munich Crisis of 1938?
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 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.
Respekt, January 2010
A review of Mary Heimann’s „Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed“
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.
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.
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?
Post Bellum 2020
Catalogue to accompany the exhibition No Night So Dark.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ivan Blatný was one of the great Czech poets of the 20th century. In the words of the novelist Josef Škvorecký, “he created poetry of absolute originality and great beauty, devoid of cliché, neither patriotic nor political.” Yet Blatný spent the greater part of his life in psychiatric institutions. Much of his most celebrated poetry was written in Saint Clement’s Hospital in Ipswich, where he was “rediscovered” after years of quietly throwing his poetry away at the end of each day. I travelled to Brno, Prague, Ipswich and Clacton-on-Sea in the footsteps of this brilliant and elusive poet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hannah Pritchard (1709–68) was one the great English actresses of the eighteenth century, excelling in 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.
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.
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 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.
Here are links to programmes with and about poets, featured in my biweekly radio series Czech Books between 2003 and 2019.
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.