Czech Books Ivan Blatny: the strange story of a Czech poet in English exile
Welcome to Czech Books. Ivan Blatny is one of the most interesting but most neglected Czech poets of the 20th century. He was born in Brno in 1919 and died in England in 1990. In his twenties Blatny was one of the central figures in the cultural avant-garde, alongside the likes of the artist and poet, Jiri Kolar, and the painter Kamil Lhotak. But when the communists came to power in 1948 he defected to Britain, much to the fury of the Czechoslovak authorities. In the years that followed his mental health gradually deteriorated and he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, spending most of the rest of his life - all but forgotten - in various psychiatric hospitals in England. He was still writing poetry on the day he died. Martin Tharp is a scholar of Ivan Blatny's work, and has translated many of his poems into English. For the rest of the programme, with the help of fellow Blatny scholar Rachel Mikos, he tells the strange story of Ivan Blatny's life in England.
Martin Tharp
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