About Josef Škvorecký
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. In this period he completed several novels including his first novel The Cowards (written 1948–49, published 1958) and The End of the Nylon Age (1956). In 1971, he and his wife founded 68 Publishers which, over the next 20 years, published banned Czech and Slovak books.
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