Václav Bartuška is today Czechia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom. He first came to public attention as a student leader during the Velvet Revolution. Soon after he was tasked with investigating Czechoslovakia’s recently deposed StB secret police, a subject the then journalist covered in a best-selling book. More recently, Bartuška served for nearly two decades as the Czech government’s envoy for energy security – and we discussed all of these chapters in his fascinating life at our studios in Prague.

Artist and actress Ester Geislerová has spent much of 2026 introducing people to the story of her late father Petr Geisler. This began with an exhibition dedicated to the journalist and calligrapher at Prague’s DOX art space and more recently has centred on her documentary A Pint of Ink, which premiered at Karlovy Vary. The film is produced by Ester’s sister Anna Geislerová, one of Czechia’s most famous actresses. Ahead of the recent cinema release of the documentary, I spoke to Ester Geislerová, who is also involved in a project named Therapy Through Sharing.

After cementing its reputation in Czechia with an acclaimed multipurpose arena, the young Brno-based architecture studio Chybík + Krištof is increasingly going international. The firm has significant projects in London and Paris in the pipeline – and ambitions to work even further afield in future. I caught up with co-founder Ondřej Chybík, who is 41, at the company’s bustling offices in central Prague.

After holding a number of senior roles in Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs, Alan Gibbons became the country’s ambassador to Czechia in 2023. With the Dublin government taking over the rotating presidency of the European Union on July 1, I sat down with Mr. Gibbons to ask what that means for Ireland, and for his own role. We also discussed the scenes in March when thousands of Irish football fans descended on Prague, the gap between Irish and Czech attitudes to the EU – and much more.

Earlier this year, Jan Zikmund launched Zikmund Literary, an agency that primarily aims to help Czech authors find readers around the world. But how does he plan to achieve this? How do books from this country tend to fare in foreign markets? And what other states can Czechia learn from in this arena? I discussed these questions and more with Zikmund, who is in his mid 30s and previously helped promote Czech writing in English-speaking countries at the state-funded Czech Literary Centre.

Since its seat-of-the-pants beginnings in the early 2000s, the Prague Fringe has established itself as one of the leading events of its kind in Europe. Indeed, this year the festival is marking no less than a quarter century of existence with a packed programme that gets underway on May 22. The Prague Fringe was first dreamt up by two friends: Steve Gove, who still runs it, and Angus Coull, who is now back in the pair’s native Scotland. And ahead of this year’s landmark edition, Gove and Coull shared often colourful recollections of the festival’s beginnings.

London-born Benjamin Souček renovates stately homes in Czechia, the country of his forefathers. Indeed, Souček – who is also active in Prague cricket circles – has even received an award at the Czech Senate for his contribution to the country’s cultural heritage.

Alongside the general explosion of freedom in 1990s Prague, there was also a boom in English-language newspapers and magazines in the city. The short-lived age of titles such as Prognosis, The Prague Post, Think and many others is the subject of a recent series of blog posts by travel writer Mark Baker. I spoke to Baker, who at one point was business editor at The Prague Post, at our studios.

Pavlína Louženská is a trend forecaster, helping banks, startups and other organisations understand likely developments in the coming years – and plan accordingly. When we spoke, the conversation took in the methods Louženská employs to predict the future, why Czechs may be less bothered about keeping up to date than other nations, whether it’s embarrassing to be a “laggard” – and much more.

Jana Ciglerová is just about to become Czech Radio’s correspondent in Washington. Unusually the journalist is moving there not from Prague but Florida, where she has lived for the best part of a decade and worked for a Czech media outlet. Ahead of this big switch, I asked Ciglerová about everything from keeping up with the non-stop pronouncements of President Trump to how living in the U.S. has shaped her sons’ lives.

This week saw the first screening in Prague of the independent movie Wooden Hearts, which stars Vít Hořejš, founder of the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre. The fiction film also features many of the traditional puppets that Hořejš – who left Czechoslovakia in the late 1970s – uncovered in an old Czech church in Manhattan several decades ago. He and his life partner Bonnie Stein, who produced Wooden Hearts and also appears in the charming picture, stopped by at our studios just ahead of the screening.