To celebrate the centenary of the birth of the great Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub, comedians Dominic Frisby and Elf Lyons, Professor Sunetra Gupta, Dr Sunday Popo-Ola, singer-songwriter Vladimír Merta, and poets Jack Cooper and Jonáš Hájek have recorded special video messages paying tribute to his life and work which will be featured on the Czech Centre’s website and social media in the run up to his centenary on the 13th September.

MIROSLAV HOLUB, a leading immunologist and an internationally recognised poet, was an extraordinary figure, a unique and hugely underappreciated talent. Interestingly, Holub did not draw a distinction between his scientific work and his poetry. 'I have a single goal but two ways to reach it,‘ he said. ‘I apply them both in turn. Poetry and science form the basis of my experience.'

In addition to writing more that 150 scientific papers, Holub later developed a strain of hairless mice that were used to study various diseases. Inspired by his scientific experiences, Holub's poetry ‘based on an unsentimental, probing, compassionate, witty sense of the modern world´ was not published in Communist Czechoslovakia between 1970 - 1982, but was well-known in English and was championed by the leading Irish poet Seamus Heaney and English Poet Laureate Ted Hughes amongst others.

His many poetry collections include Selected Poems (1967), On the Contrary (1984), The Fly (1987); Supposed to Fly (1996); Vanishing Lung Syndrome (1990), The Rampage (1997) and Poems Before & After: Collected English Translations by Bloodaxe Books, 1990/2006 covering thrity years of his poetry.

The Hommage to Miroslav Holub is organised by the Czech Centre in collaboration with Bloodaxe Books, the Science Museum, The Poetry Society and the Czech Literary Centre.

With thanks to Scott Anthony, Neil Astley, Dominic Frisby, Elf Lyons, Jonáš Hájek, Vladimír Merta, Jack Cooper, Sunestra Gupta, Dominic Frisby, Elf Lyons and Sunday Popo-Ola.

Recorded at the Science Museum Lates on the 30th November 2022.

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