Josef Škvorecký

1924–2012

**Biography** Born in Náchod, Czechoslovakia, Škvorecký graduated in 1943 from the Reálné gymnasium in his native Náchod. For two years during the Second World War he was a slave labourer in a German aircraft factory. After the war, he began to study at the Faculty of Medicine of Charles University in Prague, but after his first term he moved to the Faculty of Arts, where he studied Philosophy and graduated in 1949.[2] In 1951 he gained a Ph.D. in Philosophy. Between 1952 and 1954, he performed his military service in the Czechoslovak army. He worked briefly as a teacher, editor and translator during the 1950s. During this period he completed several novels including his first novel The Cowards (written 1948-49, published 1958[3]) and The End of the Nylon Age (1956).[4] They were condemned and banned by the Communist authorities after their publication. His prose style, open-ended and improvisational, was an innovation, but this and his democratic ideals were a challenge to the Communist regime. Škvorecký kept writing, and helped nurture the democratic movement that culminated in the Prague Spring in 1968. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that year, Škvorecký and his wife, writer and actress Zdena Salivarová, fled to Canada. In 1971, he and his wife founded 68 Publishers which, over the next twenty years, published banned Czech and Slovak books.> The imprint became an important mouthpiece for dissident writers, such as Václav Havel, Milan Kundera, and Ludvík Vaculí

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