Biography
Karel Čapek was born in 1890 in Malé Svatoňovice, Bohemia, and studied philosophy in Prague, Berlin and Paris, earning a doctorate in 1915; in Prague he met the future president Tomáš Masaryk. From 1917 he worked as a journalist, first for the newspaper Národní listy and from 1921 for the liberal paper Lidové noviny, for which his brother, the painter and writer Josef Čapek, also wrote. Alongside plays such as “R.U.R.”, he wrote novels, travel books and political journalism, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times; in 1937/38 he reportedly missed out on the award partly because the Swedish Academy wished to avoid provoking Hitler. Čapek died of pneumonia in Prague on 25 December 1938, shortly before the Gestapo came to arrest him.
On Stagelog
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