Jaroslav Erik Frič

Who is Jaroslav Erik Frič?

Jaroslav Erik Frič is a Moravian poet, musician, publisher and organizer of underground culture festivals.

He studied the primary and secondary schools in Ostrava; there he also spent a year learning English, Russian, French and Italian at a language school. In 1968, he travelled through the Western Europe immediately after the exams, spending most of the time in England and Scotland. During this time, he earned money for example as a busker. He returned to occupied Czechoslovakia and studied English and philosophy, at first in Olomouc, then in Brno. He graduated in 1974. Not willing to collaborate with the communist regime in any way, he worked as a waiter until the 1989 revolution.

In 1969, Frič started to publish in samizdat, together with fellow poets Petr Mikeš and Eduard Zacha, in Ostrava and then in Olomouc. His edition, after a theologist and another poet Rostislav Valušek joined them, turned into a line of books called Texty přátel.