Bohumil Hrabal

Bohumil Hrabal was born on 28 March 1914 in what would become Czechoslovakia. Over the decades that followed, he built a body of work that placed him in the top tier of Czech letters — a reputation that held through regime changes, censorship, and the fracturing of nations. By the time he died on 3 February 1997, his standing was secure: routinely listed among the finest Czech writers of the twentieth century, a benchmark others are measured against.