How to Live According to Václav Havel in the 21st Century?

A lecture by Pavel Kosatík

The title suggests this is not about distant history, but about what Václav Havel's thinking offers us here and now.

Pavel Kosatík studied legal history at Charles University's Faculty of Law in Prague (1984). He worked as a publishing editor (Czechoslovak Writer, co-founded the publishing house Who is Who, among others) and in the first half of the 1990s worked in newspapers - he was an editor at MF Dnes and deputy editor-in-chief of Reflex. Later he led the quarterly journal of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Národní 3. Since 1996 he has been freelance, working as a writer and screenwriter.

He is the author of thirty books, mostly on modern Czech history - biographies (T. G. Masaryk, Jan Masaryk, Ferdinand Peroutka, Pavel Tigrid, Pavel Kohout, Věra Čáslavská, Emil Zátopek and others) and essays (Czech Dreams, Slovak Century and others). He has written screenplays for numerous television documentaries for Czech Television (the 12-part series Samizdat, 2001; Jan Masaryk I-II, 1998; Year 68 I-III, 2008 and others) and for feature films, including the 9-part series Czech Century (CT 2013-2024) and Conversations with TGM (Bedna Films, 2018). He is a recipient of the Ferdinand Peroutka Prize, the Tom Stoppard Prize, and the Miroslav Ivanov Prize; in 2024 he received the presidential award For Merit to the State in Culture and Art.

The lecture is held with the support of U Vojtěchů Brewery in Pardubice and Versino CZ, s.r.o.