Josef Škvorecký

Josef Škvorecký (Náchod, 1924 - Toronto, 2012) was a Czech novelist, essayist and publisher who spent much of his life in Canada. Writing in Czech and, at times, in English, he explored the horrors of totalitarianism, the experience of exile and the appeal of jazz. He matters both for his novels and for his role in supporting banned writers in Central Europe under communist rule.

The son of a bank clerk, he fell in love with jazz as a teenager and played the tenor saxophone as an amateur before the Second World War; that experience later fed into his novella The Bass Saxophone. During the war he was forced to work as a slave labourer in a Messerschmitt aircraft factory in Náchod. He then enrolled in medicine at Charles University in Prague, but after a single term switched to philosophy and arts, graduating in 1949 and earning a doctorate in 1951. In the 1950s he worked as a teacher, editor and translator. His novels The Cowards and The End of the Nylon Age were banned by the communist authorities, and he lost his post as editor of the magazine Světová literatura. His open, improvised prose was new and, for the regime, unsettling.

After the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968 he emigrated to Canada with his wife, the writer and actress Zdena Salivarová. In 1971 the couple founded 68 Publishers, which for two decades issued banned Czech and Slovak books by writers such as Václav Havel, Milan Kundera and Ludvík Vaculík. He taught in the English department at the University of Toronto and wrote detective novels featuring Lieutenant Borůvka, essays on film and music, and scripts with the director Miloš Forman. He received the Neustadt Prize in 1980 and Canada's Governor General's Award in 1984, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1982. His legacy lies in keeping Czech literature alive beyond its borders, and he is now regarded as both a Czech and a Canadian author.