Prague Talk

The poet and veteran broadcaster Igor Pomerantsev has been living in Prague since the mid-1990s, when his station, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, moved to the Czech capital. Born in Russia but raised in Ukraine, Pomerantsev left the Soviet Union at the end of his 20s after being accused of circulating “anti-Soviet literature”. He and his family later settled in London, where he worked for the Ru...

Englishman Adam Stewart is the founder and artistic director of the Prague Youth Theatre, a thriving company bring together around 200 children and teenagers from dozens of different nations in the Czech capital. He is also a leading member of the Cimrman English Theatre; it performs plays “by” the much-loved Czech comedic character Jára Cimrman to English-speaking audiences and recently celebrate...

New documentary World Between Us follows Czech photographer Marie Tomanová as her career skyrockets in New York. The intimate film is also a portrait of Tomanová’s art historian husband, Thomas Beachdel – and reflects the close friendship between the photographer and its director, fellow Czech Marie Dvořáková. I caught up with Dvořáková, a one-time Student Oscar winner who has also spent a large p...

US singer Anne Marie Kenny first came to Czechoslovakia in 1990 at the invitation of President Václav Havel, who facilitated a concert for her at a Prague club. She later launched a successful employment and training agency and remained in her ancestral homeland for the rest of the decade. Kenny shares these stories and much more in her memoir A Song for Bohemia, which has just been launched in Cz...

This year the Ecstasy of St. Theresa, perhaps the best-known Czech indie band of the 1990s and 2000s, delighted fans by returning to the stage after a hiatus of almost a decade. And the group, whose core members are founder Jan P. Muchow and singer and actress Kateřina Winterová, are also planning to release new music, the former says in an interview conducted at his Prague studio. Muchow also dis...

The Czech-born, US-based illustrator and writer Petr Sís has just seen the publication of his latest work, a book of In Praise of Mystery by American poet laureate Ada Limon. In a project years in the making, the poem has also been etched onto a NASA spaceship bound for Jupiter’s moon Europa. In an interview from his home in New York State, Sís discussed the new book as well as his poster for the...

Evan Rail’s The Absinthe Forger is a true crime story that also explores the fascinating history of the spirit itself. Central to the new book is the absinthe produced before the “evil drink” was banned virtually everywhere in the early 20th century – only to make a comeback in the 1990s, a revival in which Czechia played a major part. Rail, a long-time resident of Prague, discussed that aspect of...

As director of the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, Marek Hovorka is one of the most important people in the field of documentaries in Czechia. The 44-year-old started the event while still at school and today it draws many thousands of film buffs to the usually sleepy Vysočina town every year. Ahead of the 28th edition of Ji.hlava I caught up with Hovorka to discuss the festival’...

Jana Prikryl was five, and called Jana Přikrylová, when her parents fled communist Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s and built a new life in the West. She has since gone on to become a successful poet and a top editor at the highly respected New York Review of Books. But how much did initially speaking Czech shape the writer’s approach to language? I discussed that question and many more with Prik...

UK public relations man Euan Edworthy has called Prague home for the last three decades. In that time he has been involved in a number of initiatives, perhaps most notably building a monument to Czechoslovak WWII RAF aviators in the city’s Klárov district, that have earned him UK honour the MBE for services to Czech-British relations. We spoke at the offices of his company Best Communications, rig...

When Milan Babík was appointed director of the Václav Havel Library recently his name was not familiar to many. That is in large part because he had spent the previous three decades in the United States, where he effectively emigrated as a teenager, in search of educational opportunity. When I spoke to Mr. Babík at the Library, a stone’s throw from Prague’s Národní, we discussed the institution’s...

The anonymous writer behind the Czech Please social media accounts has been reviewing restaurants in Prague for over a decade and a half. Also going by the pen name Brewsta, Czech Please has built up a large and dedicated following as one of Czechia’s best-known English-language food bloggers. When we met at a cool Prague café, we discussed the city’s dining scene at length – but I first asked Cze...

Veronika Tuckerová has been teaching Czech Studies at Harvard University for the past decade. But she has also done extensive research into the Prague German-language author Franz Kafka. Indeed, the academic is currently preparing a book entitled Reading Kafka in Prague: The Reception of Franz Kafka in Czechoslovakia, which mainly looks at changing perceptions of the writer in the communist period...

The new owner of the Prague Lions discusses why he feels the time is right for American football in Europe and says it could become Czechia's third favourite sport.

Art expert Nicholas Lowry has Czech heritage and lived in Prague in the early 1990s. He will soon be seen as the presenter of a documentary on classic Czech graphic design.

Rosamund Johnston discusses her book on Czechoslovak Radio, 1948–1969. How "communist" was the station? And what happened to staff after the Soviet invasion?

Academic Peter Zusi discusses teaching Czech literature, his new book on the Czech avant-garde and Karel Teige and his teenage rock band with a future movie star.

Half-sisters Eva Paddock and Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines were 3 and 9 when trains organised by Nicholas Winton and others saved them from the Nazis. They share their story.

Englishman Ed Ley on his fascinating social media project recording the stories of the streets of Prague, one by one.

Prague-based filmmaker Kaveh Daneshmand on how his homeland Iran manages to produce great films despite severe restrictions, whether he could ever move back and much more.

Writer and biographer Jan Novák discusses Miloš Forman, the Mašíns, Václav Havel and Milan Kundera, as well as sharing some of his family's own eye-popping stories.

In a broad and revealing interview, US Ambassador to Czechia Bijan Sabet discusses everything from his time as an early Twitter investor to his love of photography.

Why is the Czech economy so deep in the doldrums? And how to turn things around? Tomáš Dvořák, who has described Czechia as "the sick man of Europe", offers some insights.

Top Czech jazz pianist and composer Emil Viklický discusses his successful career, numerous collaborations (including big jazz names, and Václav Havel) and much, much more.

Academic Roman David has fascinating insights into how the Czech justice system, and society, dealt with the transition to democracy after the 1989 fall of communism.