Ludvík Aškenazy

Who was Ludvík Aškenazy?

Ludvík Aškenazy was a Czech writer and journalist. He was born into a Jewish family in Sachsenberg, part of Český Těšín.

He studied Slavonic philology in Lviv, which then was a part of Poland.

During the World War II, he was a soldier in the Czech units of the Soviet Army in the Soviet Union. He was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Between 1945 and 1950 he worked in the Czech state radio and after that he became government-sanctioned "writer."

After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he left for exile and until 1976 lived in Munich. Between 1976 and 1986, he lived in the Italian town of Bolzano with his wife, Leonie Mann, daughter of the German writer Heinrich Mann.

He won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 1977.