Roman Szpuk: A Stone, a Choir and a Shoelace

Poet, novelist and publicist born in 1960 in Teplice to a Czech-German-Polish-Ukrainian family. He studied at the University of Economics in Prague but left before finishing, and then worked in a number of professions (as a surveyor’s assistant at the Lesoproject Teplice company, a night watchman at a Bohumilice cowshed, a warden of the Šumava Protected Landscape Area, etc.). Today, he works as a meteorologist at the Churáňov station. He co-founded the Skupina XXVI literary group and published over twenty books, especially poetry collections: Otisky dlaní [Palmprints] (1990), Ohrožen skřivanem [Skylark Danger] (1994), Silentio pro smíšený sbor [A Silentio for a Mixed Choir] (2009), Kámen v botě [The Stone in the Shoe] (2012), Chraplavé chorály [Hoarse Chorales] (2013), A zavaž si tkaničky [And Tie Your Shoelaces] (2016) and more.