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Josef Škvorecký, CM (; September 27, 1924 – January 3, 2012) 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. ==Life== Born the son of a bank clerk in Náchod, Czechoslovakia, Škvorecký graduated in 1943 from the Reálné ''gymnasium'' in his native Náchod. For two years in the Second World War he was a slave labourer in a Messerschmitt aircraft factory in Náchod. 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. In 1951 he gained a PhD in philosophy. He then taught for two years at the Social School for Girls in Hořice v Podkrkonoší.〔 Between 1952 and 1954 he performed his military service in the Czechoslovak Army. He worked briefly as a teacher, editor and translator in the 1950s. 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). 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. As a result he lost his job as editor of the magazine ''Světová literatura'' ("World Literature").〔 Škvorecký kept writing, and helped nurture the democratic movement that culminated in the Prague Spring in 1968. After the Warsaw Pact 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 20 years, published banned Czech and Slovak books. The imprint became an important mouthpiece for dissident writers, such as Václav Havel, Milan Kundera, and Ludvík Vaculík, among many others. For providing this critical literary outlet, the president of post-Communist Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel, later awarded the couple the Order of the White Lion in 1990. He taught at the Department of English at the University of Toronto where he was eventually appointed Professor Emeritus of English and Film. He retired in 1990. In Canada, he is considered to be a Canadian author despite the fact that he is mostly published in Czech. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Josef Škvorecký」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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