Ivan Klíma

Ivan Klíma (born Ivan Kauders, 9 September 1931 – 4 October 2025) was a Czech novelist and playwright. He received the Magnesia Litera award and the Franz Kafka Prize, among other honours.

Early life and career Klíma was born Ivan Kauders in Prague on 9 September 1931. His early childhood in Prague was happy and uneventful, but this all changed with the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, after the Munich Agreement.

In November 1941, first his father Vilém Klíma and then, in December, he and his mother and brother were ordered to leave for the concentration camp at Theriesenstadt (Terezín), where he was to remain until its liberation by the Red Army in May 1945. He and both his parents survived incarceration, even though Terezín, a holding camp for Jews from central and southern Europe, was regularly cleared of its overcrowded population by transports to "the East," that is, to death camps such as Auschwitz. The family adopted the less German-sounding surname of Klíma after the war. He wrote that "anyone who has been through a concentration camp as a child, who has been completely dependent on an external power which can at any moment come in and beat or kill him and everyone around him, probably moves through life at least a bit differently from people who have been spared such an education. That life can be snapped like a piece of string - that was my daily lesson as a child." Eventually, his childhood hopes for the triumph of good over evil became an adult awareness that it was often "not the forces of good and evil that do battle with each other, but merely two different evils, in competition for the control of the world".

Writing Klíma was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2002. His two-volume memoir Moje šílené století (My Crazy Century) won the Magnesia Litera, a Czech literary prize, in the non-fiction category in 2010. My Crazy Century was published in English in 2013 by Grove Press.