Egon Hostovský

Who was Egon Hostovský?

Egon Hostovský, was a Czech writer. He was related to the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. Hostovský described Zweig as "a very distant relative"; some sources describe them as cousins.

He studied at the gymnasium in Náchod in 1927, then philosophy in Prague and at university in Vienna in 1929, but did not graduate.

He returned to Prague in 1930 and worked as an editor in several publishing houses.

In 1937 Hostovský joined the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in 1939 he was posted to Brussels, from where, after the occupation of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939, he emigrated to Paris. After Paris was occupied in 1940, he fled to Portugal and then, in 1941, travelled to the United States of America, where he worked in New York at the Czechoslovakian consulate.

His father, sisters, and their families died in concentration camps.

After World War II he returned to Czechoslovakia and again worked at the Foreign Ministry, but in 1948 he left into his second exile, to Denmark, and then to Norway and finally to the United States, where he worked as a Czech language teacher and later as a journalist and editor at Radio Free Europe. Several of his novels, including The Midnight Patient and Three Nights, were translated in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Philip Hillyer Smith, Jr., a scholar of linguistics and the Czech language.