Benjamin Kuras

Benjamin Kuras (* April, 4, 1944) is an Anglo-Czech writer dubbed “a humorist who is taken seriously” by ''The Prague Post'' and “Pope of Czech literature” by the Czech daily ''Dnes''. His non-fiction writing covers a broad variety of subjects from history, politics and religion to sex and food. His preferred dramatic genre is tragi-comedy. Czech expatriate in London since 1968 (UK citizen since 1974), he worked for a decade as broadcaster with the BBC World Service and had his first English play performed on BBC Radio 4 in 1976. This was followed by further 15 plays, mostly detective comedies, performed on radio and in small theatres in the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Israel and the Czech Republic.

His major success was ''Supper of Ashes'', a tragi-comedy about the last days of the Italian Renaissance heretic philosopher Giordano Bruno. After a rehearsed reading at the Soho Poly in London, the play was taken up by BBC Radio and had a 16-month run in German translation in the repertory of Eurotheater in Bonn where it was produced with the assistance of the Italian Institute of Culture and the University of Bonn. On the Czech stage, his play ''Friday Murder'' remained in the repertory of a small Prague theatre from 2013 for 6 years and was voted best of the year at a festival of small-cast plays. His ''Never Done'' played for 5 years in his birthplace Zlín and had a TV production.

In 1990, he started making return visits to the Czech Republic. and took up writing again in Czech, with articles for several newspapers and magazines which by 2022 total over 3000. He is a regular contributor to the Czech mutation of Playboy. He has published over 30 books in Czech and 4 in English. His latest Czech books, as well as a large number of articles, explore the suicide of Western civilisation and the perils it is currently facing. His latest produced play ''Self–Deceptions'', written first in Czech, a comedy on the quirks of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (with a bit of help from Che Guevara), had its premier on Czech Radio in 2013. Kuras' translations for the Czech stage include Jeff Baron´s ''Visiting Mr. Green'' and John Misto´s ''Madame Rubinstein'' Provided by Wikipedia