Váchal, Jan

Jan Váchal was born in Prague in 1960. As he is an economist by profession, the writing of stage plays and fiction is very much unlike his day-to-day work – a form of relaxation, if you will. Economics is basically an austere language of numbers, so Jan Váchal the author likes to concentrate on humour, of which there can never be enough. Of the five stage plays he has written so far, Madame Columbo Steps In and Mrs Fantômas Is Angry have enjoyed most success. His other plays are Text Messages Don’t Cry, The Evolutionist or One Third of the Square of Six Monkeys and the drily humorous drawing-room comedy To Love through Marriage.

His fiction is also worth a mention. It includes Bessy, a novel about a fashion designer, Six Trillion, a volume of humorous SF stories, the detective thriller Titanic 2022, and comedy novels such as How Not to Read Viewegh to the End and The Urntour Funeral Travel Agency. For the last-mentioned, Jan Váchal received an honourable mention in the 2018 Miloslav Švandrlík Prize, which is conferred by the Czech Writers’ Guild.