Karel Čapek

Karel Čapek was a Czech writer, playwright, and critic who lived from 9 January 1890 until 25 December 1938. He is most known for his science fiction, particularly his novel War with the Newts (1936) and the play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots, 1920), which popularized the term "robot." He also penned several politically sensitive works about the social unrest of the time. He pushed for free expression and firmly opposed the emergence of fascism and communism in Europe, influenced by American pragmatic liberalism.

Čapek was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times but never won it. Several awards, however, bear his name, such as the Karel Čapek Prize, which is given every other year by the Czech PEN Club for literary work that contributes to the reinforcement or preservation of democratic and humanist principles in society. He was also instrumental in establishing the Czechoslovak PEN Club as a member of International PEN.

Čapek died on the eve of WWII as a result of a life-long medical problem. After the war, his literary legacy became well established. In his biography of Čapek, Ivan Klíma mentions his influence on modern Czech literature as well as the development of Czech as a written language. Because of their decision to employ vernacular, Čapek and contemporaries like Jaroslav Hašek sparked a portion of the early 20th-century resurgence in written Czech. It is because of Čapek that the written Czech language grew closer to the language people actually talked, argues Klima. Čapek was a translator as well, and his translations of French poetry into Czech influenced a new generation of Czech poets.