The Engineer of Human Souls is a labyrinthine comic novel that investigates the journey and plight of novelist Danny Smiricky, a Czech immigrant to Canada. As the novel begins, he is a professor of American literature at a college in Toronto. Out of touch with his young students, and hounded by the Czech secret police, Danny is let loose to roam between past and present, adopting whatever identity that he chooses or has been imposed upon him by History.

Josef Skvorecký was born in 1924 in Nachod, Bohemia, Czechoslovakia. He received his PhD in philosophy from Charles University in Prague in 1951. His earliest works, including The Cowards (1958), were banned by communist censors. He published novels, short stories and film scripts between 1963 and 1968, during a shift to more liberal political climate. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Skvorecký and his wife, Zdena Salivarová emigrated to Canada in 1969. Together with his wife, he ran 68 Publishers, which published, in both Czech and English translations, books that we banned in Communist Czechoslovakia. By the fall of the Soviet Union, 68 published had published over 220 works. Skvorecky published many books, including novels, poetry, non-fiction, as well as for film and television, among them The Engineer of Human Souls (1984), which received the Governor General's Award for fiction. Skvorecký was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, and was awarded the Order of the White Lion in the Czech Republic in 1990. Josef Skvorecký died in 2012.

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Paul Wilson is an award-winning freelance journalist, magazine editor, radio producer and translator of Czech literature. He has contributed essays, articles and reviews to many north American and European publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Starand other literary and general interest magazines including The Walrus, which he helped establish as deputy editor and then editor (2003-4), Saturday Night, where he was Senior Editor from 1998- 2001, The Idler(Associate Editor, 1988-1992), and Books in Canada. He has worked as a books producer for three national CBC Radio shows: The Arts Tonight, with Shelagh Rogers; Morningside, with Peter Gzowski, and This Morning with Michael Enright and Avril Benoit. He has translated many plays, essays, books, and speeches by Václav Havel. His translation of The Engineer of Human Souls, by Josef Škvorecký, was awarded the Governor General's Award for Fiction in 1984, and his translation of Ivan Klíma's My Golden Trades was short listed for the Independent newspaper's International Translation Award in 1993. His latest published translations include Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult (2015) and All My Cats (2019), both by Bohumil Hrabal.

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