Michal Viewegh

Who is Michal Viewegh?

Michal Viewegh is one of the most popular contemporary Czech writers and the bestselling one. He writes about romantic relationships of his contemporaries with humour, variously successful irony as well as attempts at deeper meaningfulness; he is sometimes compared to Nick Hornby by his fans.

His books, since the late 1990s published every spring, usually sell about 50,000 copies each, bringing him an upper-high-class income unparalleled among Czech writers. By his own boastful admissions, his royalties from a successful book are equal to roughly 8 years of an average Czech salary. His 2004 income was CZK four million. Viewegh likes to point out this success with readers, as well as the fact that his books have been translated to several languages and made into films, since he fell out of favor with critics in mid-1990s, which sentiment he heartily reciprocated in his following books.

Viewegh is a political adversary of the former Czech president Václav Klaus. In some of his recent novels this attitude has been strongly and pointedly manifested.

In late 2012 Viewegh suffered a traumatic aortic rupture, his health condition was serious.