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Prague Talk

Radio Prague International

A regular interview series hosted by Ian Willoughby

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  • 21 episodes
  • Avg 20 min
  • English

Episodes 21

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  • Thursday · 16 min

    Czech indie band Ida the Young heads to UK for eight-date tour

    Unusually for a Czech band, Ida the Young are just about to begin an eight-date tour of England. The group this year won an Anděl national music award in the electronic and alternative category – and made headlines for supporting Palestine in their acceptance speech. Just before they left on tour, I caught up with Ida the Young members Iris Hobson-Mazur, Marek Koliha and Pavel Kielberger. Hobson-Mazur is from the UK but has a Czech mother – and only started living in Czechia during her studies.

  • September 3 · 18 min

    Václav Bartuška: “The revolution was too velvety”

    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.

  • August 20 · 19 min

    Ester Geislerová: Parents are always more complex than how we know them from our childhoods

    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.

  • July 17 · 22 min

    From Brno to the world: Architect Ondřej Chybík on aiming beyond Czechia’s borders

    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.

  • June 30 · 20 min

    Irish Ambassador Alan Gibbons: “Each member has different history, but EU project has been transformative”

    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.

  • May 29 · 20 min

    “When I go to the US people only know Kundera” – Jan Zikmund on bringing today’s Czech writers to the world

    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.

  • May 15 · 21 min

    Prague Fringe at 25: Steve Gove and Angus Coull on early days of leading fringe festival

    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.

  • April 7 · 23 min

    From “dark mode” to real-life connection: How Pavlína Louženská reads the future

    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.

  • March 13 · 21 min

    New Czech Radio U.S. correspondent Jana Ciglerová on Czech-Americans and MAGA and trading Miami for Washington

    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.

  • March 6 · 20 min

    Vít Hořejš and Bonnie Stein on their indie movie co-starring 200-year-old Czech marionettes

    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.

  • February 27 · 21 min

    "In the ‘90s the architecture was much more interesting": Jan Bureš on Prague's post-1989 construction boom

    Devade (Nineties) is the title of a fascinating new book and exhibition looking at architecture in Prague in the first decade after the Velvet Revolution. Among the best known buildings referred to are hotels such as the Hilton and the Don Giovanni, as well as the Myslbek Palace and the now iconic Dancing House. I discussed the challenges faced by Prague’s architects in the 1990s – as well as the advantages they enjoyed – with one of the book’s authors Jan Bureš, an architect and journalist who was himself born in 1996.

  • February 13 · 15 min

    Karel Häring on becoming a face of the Premier League for Czech soccer fans

    As a presenter on Canal+ Sport Karel Häring is one of the faces of the English Premier League for many Czech football fans. How has he managed the switch after decades as a print journalist? And what is it like working, and travelling, with star player turned pundit Karel Poborský? I discussed these questions and more with Karel Häring at our Prague studios.

  • January 30 · 15 min

    Radovan Síbrt on Mr. Nobody Against Putin, the Oscar-nominated documentary exposing war propaganda in Russian schools

    Czech interest in this year’s Academy Awards will centre on Mr. Nobody Against Putin, a Danish-Czech production nominated in the Best Documentary Feature category. The film contains footage shot surreptitiously by a teacher, Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, who wanted to expose war propaganda in schools in Russia. Talankin had no choice but to flee his native country before the documentary’s release and is now based here in Czechia. Radovan Síbrt is one of Mr. Nobody Against Putin’s two Czech producers – and I spoke to him just days after it also earned a BAFTA nomination.

  • January 16 · 22 min

    “I’m interested in the female experience”: Photographer Bet Orten on art, motherhood and moving on from fashion

    Bet Orten studied fashion photography in London after a stint as an assistant to a well-known celebrity photographer in New York. But for the last decade and a half Orten, whose Instagram profile describes her as a “female photographer taking pictures of other females”, has been living here in her native Prague. We spoke at our studios ahead of an exhibition she has coming up in the Czech capital this spring.

  • January 9 · 21 min

    “Threats alone are disaster for NATO”: Michal Smetana on Trump, Greenland and future of European security

    The Trump administration’s refusal to rule out taking the Danish territory of Greenland by force has caused shockwaves in Europe, with the threat to a fellow NATO member raising grave questions about the alliance’s future. If NATO does cease to exist in its current form, what will that mean in practical terms for European countries such as Czechia? I discussed that and related questions with Michal Smetana, a security expert at Prague’s Charles University.

  • Dec 27, 2025 · 27 min

    Markéta Irglová on reviving The Swell Season with Glen Hansard, 20 years of Falling Slowly, life in Iceland – and musicals ambitions

    Musician Markéta Irglová has had a busy 2025, releasing a new album and touring with Glen Hansard under the name The Swell Season, a joint project that had been dormant for some years. The Czech-Irish pairing famously won an Oscar in 2007 for their song Falling Slowly. First recorded in a studio near Prague, it reached international audiences in Once, as well as a successful musical based on the hit low-budget film. After a full-band tour with The Swell Season earlier in the year, Irglová and Hansard returned to Czechia for a short series of intimate shows in late November. And it was then that I caught up with the former, who lives in Iceland, for a wide-ranging interview.

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