Ivan Diviš


Ivan Diviš was a significant Czech poet and essayist of the second half of the 20th century.

Biography

He was born in Prague into the family of a bank officer. While at high school in Prague during World War II he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Pečkárna and Pankrác. From 1942, he worked in a bookstore, and at the end of the war he was employed at publisher V. Petr. After passing his maturita he studied philosophy and aesthetics at Charles University. In the early 1950s, he worked as a corrector at the Communist Rudé právo newspaper. After 1953, he worked a lathe in Liberec and Prague-Kbely. In the 1960s, he was an editor at Mladá fronta publishing house. In 1964, he converted to Roman Catholicism. In the aftermath of the Prague Spring, he emigrated to West Germany in 1969 and worked as a librarian for Radio Free Europe. He lived in Munich until the Velvet Revolution of 1989 when he returned to Prague.

Works