Milan Kundera was a Czech and French novelist. Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.
Karel Čapek was a Czech writer, playwright, critic and journalist. He has become best known for his science fiction, including his novel War with the Newts (1936) and play R.U.R., which introduced the word robot. He also wrote many politically charged works dealing with the social turmoil of his time. Influenced by American pragmatic liberalism, he campaigned in favor of free expression and strongly opposed the rise of both fascism and communism in Europe.
The Kindertransport was an organised rescue effort of children from Nazi-controlled territory that took place in 1938–1939 during the nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig. The children were placed in British foster homes, hostels, schools, and farms. Often they were the only members of their families who survived the Holocaust. The programme was supported, publicised, and encouraged by the British government, which waived the visa immigration requirements that were not within the ability of the British Jewish community to fulfil. The British government placed no numerical limit on the programme; it was the start of the Second World War that brought it to an end, by which time about 10,000 kindertransport children had been brought to the country.
Michal Viewegh is one of the most popular contemporary Czech writers.
Josef Škvorecký was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher. He spent half of his life in Canada, publishing and supporting banned Czech literature during the communist era. Škvorecký was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1980. He and his wife were long-time supporters of Czech dissident writers before the fall of communism in that country. Škvorecký's fiction deals with several themes: the horrors of totalitarianism and repression, the expatriate experience, and the miracle of jazz.
Milena Jesenská was a Czech journalist, writer, editor and translator. She is noted for a correspondence with author Franz Kafka and was one of the first to translate his work from the German language. After the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, she joined a resistance movement to help Jews and other refugees. She died in Ravensbrück, a Nazi prison camp.
The Joke is Milan Kundera's first novel, originally published in 1967. It describes how a student's private joke derails his life, and the entwined stories of his lovers and friends grappling with the shifting roles of folk traditions and religion under Communist Czechoslovakia.
Jáchym Topol is a Czech poet, novelist, musician and journalist who became a laureate of the Czech State Award for Literature in October 2017 for his novel A Sensitive Person and his life work to date.
Miloš Urban is a Czech novelist and horror writer, known as the "dark knight of Czech literature". He is best known for his 1999 novel Sedmikostelí, a Gothic crime horror set in Prague, which was translated into 11 languages. He is also a translator, and has translated works by authors including Isaac Bashevis Singer and Julian Barnes into Czech. He was the winner of the 2002 Magnesia Litera prize for prose writing for his 2001 novel Hastrman, as well as the 1996 Mladá fronta prize for his translation of Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot. As well as the Czech Republic, Urban's books have found considerable commercial success in Spanish-speaking countries.
Vítězslav Nezval was a Czech poet, writer and translator. He was one of the most prolific avant-garde Czech writers in the first half of the 20th century and a co-founder of the Surrealist movement in Czechoslovakia.
Zuzana Justman, born Zuzana Pick, is a Czech-American maker of documentary films and writer. She was born in former Czechoslovakia, which she left in 1948 with her mother after surviving two years at Theresienstadt concentration camp during World War II. She went to New York state for college and graduate school, and settled in New York City afterward. After working as a writer and translator, in the late 1980s, she started filmmaking. She has filmed most of her documentaries in the Czech Republic and other European countries, and her topics have been the Holocaust of World War II and postwar history.
Iva Hercíková was a Czech writer and author of novels and movie scripts.
Olga Hepnarová was a Czechoslovak rampage killer, who on 10 July 1973, killed eight people with a truck in Prague. Hepnarová was convicted and sentenced to death, and was executed in 1975, the last woman executed in Czechoslovakia.
Heda Margolius Kovály was a Czech writer and translator. She survived the Łódź ghetto and Auschwitz where her parents died. She later escaped whilst being marched to Bergen-Belsen to find that no one would take her in. Her husband was made a deputy minister in Czechoslovakia and he was then hanged as a traitor. As the wife of a disgraced man she married again and she and her husband were treated badly. They left for the US in 1968 when the country was invaded by the Warsaw Pact countries. She published her biography in 1973. She and her husband did not return to her homeland until 1996.
Jan Novák is a Czech-American writer, screenwriter and playwright. He writes in both Czech and English, frequently translating his work. He has received awards in both the United States and the Czech Republic. He has worked closely with such figures as Václav Havel and Miloš Forman.
Marie Majerová was a Czech writer and translator.
Věra Chase is a Czech translator and author of poetry and fiction. She lives and works in Prague.
Gimme the Money is partial autobiographical novel by Iva Pekárková about her time taxi-driving in New York City. It was published in Czech in 1996 by Nakladatelství NLN, under the name Dej Mi Ty Prachy. It was later translated into English by Iva Pekárková with help from her husband, Raymond Johnson, and published by Serpent's Tail through a grant from the Czech Ministry of Culture. Gimme the Money was also translated into German under the title, Taxi Blues, by Marcela Euler and subsequently published in 2000 by Malik Publishers. The novel is about a female Czech taxi driver Jindřiška, nicknamed Gin, and her life of navigating and finding a place in New York City and the taxi industry.
Doreen Agnes Rosemary Julia Warriner was an English development economist and humanitarian. In October 1938, she journeyed to Czechoslovakia to assist anti-Nazi refugees fleeing the Sudetenland, recently occupied by Germany. She became the head of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia in Prague which helped 15,000 German, Czech, and Jewish refugees escape Czechoslovakia while the country was being occupied and annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938 and 1939. Told that she would be arrested by the Germans Warriner departed Czechoslovakia on 23 April 1939. She was awarded an OBE in 1941. After the War, she was an academic at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
Hana Preinhaelterová was a Czech Indologist and translator, specialising in the Bengali language and literature. She was well known for her Základní kurs bengálštiny, a set of textbooks for learning the language.
