Prague Talk

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.

Englishman Simon Johnson heads the Czech branch of developers Crestyl. They are behind Prague's major Savarin Palace project, Libeň Dock and much more besides.

Mirek Gosney on Building Hitler's Empire, a documentary about the Nazis' massive forced labour system, under which his own great-grandfather worked in Germany during WWII.

Petr Kratochvíl on a new paper he co-authored which says Russia’s war on Ukraine is novel in that it is also a fight against gender and sexual equalities, with Moscow presenting itself as a defender of traditional values against the "decadent" West.

Jindřiška Bláhová, editor of a new book looking at the history of Karlovy Vary film festival pre-1989, shares fascinating insights into the event in the Cold War era.

Foreign policy expert Benjamin Tallis on neo-idealism, and why the term applies to Jan Lipavský, and what the Ukraine crisis means for the future of the EU.

Veteran DJ Jana Kománková discusses her new book about the Prague alternative station Radio 1, including its pirate beginnings as Radio Stalin and anarchic early years.

UK linguist Danny Bate, who moves between Prague and Edinburgh, discusses some of the joys of life in Czechia, learning the language, "annoying" aspects of Czech and more.