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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The 2023 film One Life with Anthony Hopkins tells the story Sir Nicholas Winton, who saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish children in Prague just before the outbreak of World War Two. I was lucky enough to spend a day with Sir Nicholas back in 2007. I made a radio documentary bringing together his memories with those of some of the “children” he rescued, all of them by that time in their 70s and 80s.

In 2007 I made a documentary for BBC Radio 4’s Archive Hour, mapping the role of radio in what came to be known as the Munich Crisis of 1938, a crisis that has disturbing echoes in our own time. The electronic media may have changed, but the techniques of manipulation remain remarkably similar. If you see parallels with Russia’s behaviour today in Ukraine and other places in its “near abroad”, you are not alone.

In a Prague second-hand bookshop, I came across a book produced by the Czechoslovak Interior Ministry in 1945, in the months just after the war. It recorded details of the massacre of June 1942 in Lidice. A total of 340 people from the village were murdered. There was a reference in the book to a film that had been made in Britain by Humphrey Jennings immediately after the massacre. I decided to find out more.

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.

It is surprising how many international Czech literary connections there are – and not just to Prague…