Ludvík Vaculík (July 23, 1926 in Brumov) is a Czech writer and journalist. A prominent samizdat writer, he is most famous as the author of the "Two Thousand Words" manifesto of June 1968.
President of Czechoslovakia and Communist Party leader Antonín Novotný and his fellow conservatives had begun taking a more repressive approach toward intellectuals and writers after the Six Day War[1] of May 1967. The following month, Vaculík, then still a member of the Communist Party, attended the Fourth Congress of the Union of Writers. Others in attendance included communists Pavel Kohout, Ivan Klíma, and Milan Kundera, as well as non-Party member Václav Havel. Vaculík made an inflammatory speech in which he rejected the leading role of the party as unnecessary and criticized it for its restrictive cultural policies and failure to address social issues.[3] Havel recalled the mixed response of the fellow writers to Vaculík's remarks: on the one hand, they were “delighted that someone had spoken the truth… but [their] delight was tempered by doubts about whether direct confrontation on the political level would lead anywhere, and by fears that it could stimulate a counterattack by the power center.” Novotný and his supporters did indeed try to bring the writers' union under their control after the congress, but failed. Vaculík's and other writers' speeches at the conference, with their anti-Novotný sentiments, increased the gap between the conservative Novotný supporters and more moderate members of the party leadership, a division that would contribute to Novotný's eventual fall.
Vaculík was among the most progressive members of the Communist Party and so more radical than Alexander Dubček, who had become Party leader in January 1968. Hence, Vaculík and others generally felt that the reforms of the April Action Programme were the minimum necessary and that they should be quickly and firmly enforced. In hopes of influencing voters in upcoming party congress elections, Vaculík released the manifesto "Two Thousand Words to Workers, Farmers, Scientists, Artists, and Everyone" in several major Prague newspapers, complete with signatures of other public figures. The date was 27 June 1968, the day after preliminary censorship was abolished by the national assembly.
In the "Two Thousand Words," Vaculík asked that the public “demand the resignation of people who have misused their power” by criticism, demonstrations, and strikes. He also expressed concern over the "recent apprehension" regarding the reforms due to "the possibility that foreign forces"-those of the Warsaw Treaty Organization-"may intervene in Czechoslovakia's internal development." If this were to happen, Vaculík argued:
…the only thing we can do is to hold our own and not indulge in any provocation. We can assure our government-with weapons if need be-as long as it does what we give it a mandate to do.
In case of invasion, Vaculík felt that the people of Czechoslovakia should defend themselves and their government (so long as it remained acceptably reformist) with force.
Despite the overall moderate tone and marxist-leninist orthodoxy, the "Two Thousand Words" called for action on the part of the public in case of military intervention and therefore denied the leading role of the party, as Vaculík's 1967 speech had. It was popular throughout Czechoslovakia with both intellectuals and workers, and its popularity only increased after the party officially condemned it. It also significantly increased the concerns of the Soviet Union. Following the “Two Thousand Words,” Brezhnev's party leadership, seeing a situation similar to that in 1956 Hungary developing, used the term "counterrevolution" to describe the Prague Spring for the first time. If a counterrevolution was taking place (and the Soviet Union was increasingly disposed to categorizing the events in Czechoslovakia as such, as other radicals continued to act and Dubček failed to gain their confidence), socialism as the Soviet Union saw it was threatened and invasion by Warsaw Treaty Organization troops, as occurred 20-21 August 1968, was deemed justified. This policy of the acceptability of using force wherever socialism was thought to be threatened would become known as the Brezhnev doctrine, and Vaculík's "Two Thousand Words" was an integral step toward this early application of it.
After Gustáv Husák came to power in 1969 and censorship increased, Vaculík (now no longer a party member) was part of the circle of dissident writers in Czechoslovakia. In 1973, he started Edice Petlice (Edition Padlock), a samizdat series that he ran until 1979. Others followed with their own series, despite harassment from the party's secret police. Some samizdat authors, including Vaculík, were also published in the west.
The core of the samizdat authors eventually developed and signed the foundation document of Charter 77; Vaculík attended the second of the planning meetings in December 1976. On 6 January 1977, Vaculík, along with Havel and Pavel Landovský, an actor, attempted to take a copy of the charter to the post office to mail to the Czechoslovak government. Their car was pulled over by the Party secret police, and all three were taken in for interrogation. Other signatories were subsequently subjected to interrogations and searches of their homes, as well.
In late 1978, however, Vaculík published the article "Remarks on Courage," a piece that helped set the tone for criticism of charterists. Of the original signatories, most were from the intelligentsia in Prague and Brno, and Vaculík and others warned against them becoming so isolated that average citizens could no longer relate to Charter. His criticism worked against mythologization around Charter and ensured continued discussion of its position and role.

Canadian author Geoff Ryman has won eight awards for his nine books and stories, many of which are science fiction.  These include The Unconquered Country (1986, winner of the World Fantasy Award and British Science Fiction Association Award) and The Child Garden (1989: Arthur C. Clarke Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award and British Science Fiction Association Award).
His most recent SF novel, Air (2005), won a John W. Campbell Memorial Award and was nominated for the Sunburst Award in Canada, while his mainstream fiction includes Was (1992), a novel about the American West viewed through the history of The Wizard of Oz which has been performed as a play and a musical in the US.
His interactive web novel 253: a novel for the Internet in Seven Cars and a Crash, in which 253 people sit on a London tube and are each described in 253 words, won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award for best novel not published in hardback.
As well as being an author Geoff helped lead the UK government onto the web, starting a web design team at the Central Office of Information in 1994. He also led the teams that designed the first official British Monarchy and 10 Downing Street websites, and until recently worked on the UK government's flagship website www.direct.gov.uk.
He has a flat in a large town on the Amazon River in Brazil where he is a frequent visitor, and has started a writing workshop in Cambodia where he helps with arts projects. He has taught five times at Clarion Workshops in the United States, and was previously Senior Lecturer on the Creative Writing programme at the University of Northumbria.

I was born in Canada in 1940 and raised there. From 1956 until 1964 I lived in the USA, taking a BA at NYU in 1962 while living with Pamela Zoline. Judith Clute and I were married in 1964. Since 1968 I have lived in London as does Judith Clute in the same flat (see Polder below), though we both spend much time abroad. I have no biological children, though Callie Hand and Tristan Grant mean to me what biological children mean to biological parents.
My first professional publication was a long poem called "Carcajou Lament" for Triquarterly in 1959, and my first sf story was "A Man Must Die" for New Worlds in 1966; but I've written mostly non-fiction. I began professional reviewing for The Toronto Star in 1966, and have worked as a reviewer, mostly in the literatures of the fantastic, for many journals, ever since. I currently do two columns: Excessive Candour for Science Fiction Weekly; and Scores for Interzone. Much of this material has been assembled in three collections: Strokes: Essays and Reviews 1966-1986 (1988), Look at the Evidence (1996) and Scores: Reviews 1993-2003 (2003).
Other non-fiction books include The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1979; second edition 1993) with Peter Nicholls, and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) with John Grant. In both cases Nicholls and Grant and I were listed as editors, though the books were in fact mostly written by the three of us variously. I wrote Science Fiction: the Illustrated Encyclopedia (1995) solo, and The Book of End Times (1999). I've co-edited some anthologies.
I continue to publish fiction infrequently. There are two novels to date: The Disinheriting Party (1977) and Appleseed (2001). The latter is sf. A sequence of definitions of horror motifs, The Darkening Garden, will appear in late 2006; a Third Edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is being prepared for online release at the end of 2007.
I have been a Trustee of the Telluride Institute, Telluride, Colorado, since its founding in 1985; and a Trustee of The Science Fiction Foundation, England, since 1997, having served earlier on the SFF Committee and as Book Reviews Editor for the SFF journal Foundation 1980-1990.
I am a book collector. There is no twelve-step.

Petra Hůlová (1979) is one of the rising stars of Czech literature. This is proved by the fact that the rights of her work are already being sold to various countries. In 2002 she made her debut with the book Paměť mojí babičce (In Memory of My Grandmother). The Czech press reacted enthusiastically and her book was awarded ion 2003 with prestigious Magnesia Litera Prize for being the discovery of the year. Moreover her colleagues, critics and publisher have proclaimed, in a large nationwide newspaper, In Memory of my Grandmother to be the book of the year 2002.

Her book has been sold to France (Éditions de L'Olivier), Hungary (Európa Könyvkiadó), The Netherlands (Uitgeverij Prometheus/Bert Bakker), Poland (Wydawnictwa W.A.B.), Germany (Luchterhand Verlag) and the United States (Northwestern University Press).

In 2004 Petra Hůlová published her long awaited second book Přes matný sklo (Through Frosted Glass). The book was well received by the Czech press and since its appearance in September the novel has been at the top of the bestselling list in the Czech Republic. It has been published in Hungary (Európa Könyvkiadó) and the rights have been bought by Luchterhand in Germany

In October 2005, her novel Circus Les Mémoires, appeared. An epic novel in which Hůlova demonstrates for once and forever she is no longer a talent. She is world class. It will be published in Germany by Luchterhand.

Her most recent novel Plastic-furnished, Three-bedroom came out in 2006 and went straight away to the top of the best-seller's list in the Czech Republic.