BH & SR Copyrights
I am your contact for the copyright of Bohumil Hrabal (outside of the Czech Republic and Slovakia) and Susanna Roth. A dedicated website will be linked here when it’s ready:
If you have any queries or questions on Bohumil Hrabal or Susanna Roth copyrights, please contact me by e-mail at
danroth (a) drtext.ch
BH & SR Background
Bohumil Hrabal, born in 1914 in Brno, is one of the most prominent and perhaps most original Czech writers of the 20th century. He died on 3 February 1997 in Prague (officially “falling“ out a hospital window, but that’s another story).
Susanna Roth, my aunt, born in 1950 in Winterthur, Switzerland, was a bohemist, Czech-German translator and indefatigable promotor of Bohumil Hrabal’s work.
For her contribution to making his literature known abroad, Hrabal bequeathed his author’s rights outside of the former Czechoslovakia to Susanna Roth in his last will and testament. Sadly, my aunt Susanna died (from cancer) only five months after the author, aged 47. Unmarried and childless, she left behind her mother, sister, brother and four nephews. So I was entrusted with managing Bohumil Hrabal’s literary copyright outside of the Czech Republic and Slovakia as one of the heirs and representative of the proprietors.
I have been planning (and failing) for quite a while to set up a website about Bohumil Hrabal – one focus of course being copyright licence requests by publishers, but also the fascinating Czech writer in general and my aunt Susanna’s work in particular.
While this web content is still unfinished, if you’d like to find out more about Bohumil Hrabal and Susanna Roth, you may want to start with their respective Wikipedia entries: