The Czech writer Josef Skvorecky, who died yesterday in Toronto, used to be a mountaineer and climbing blends many of his books. Climbing is the topic of a short story "Death on the needle" from the stories collection of Sorrow of Lieutenant Boruvka. It was also filmed.

Climbing is already appearing in his first novel, The Cowards (Zbabelci). Ideas to these books drew from his hometown Nachod area in East Bohemia (CZ).
As Naše.Broumovsko, a local site, writes today, which quotes from the book of Jan Meier  Broumovsko & literature, beginning with climber Josef Skvorecky is associated with Ostas climbing Area next to the Police nad Metuji clouse to Adrspach sandstones.
John Meier cites Skvorecky interview for the Czech magazine Stadion: "I started climbing in the Ostas. I was not a good climber. I do not think I've ever climbed harder routes than III. (UIAA). It was an uncomfortable feeling while climbing in  Ostas. I did not know where to go, I trembled and began to fear, my legs vibrate. ... It was there that I first fell and swung on a rope."

Josef Skvorecky was a leading contemporary Czech writer and publisher who escaped from communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia to Canada in 1969. He and his wife were long-time supporters of Czech dissident writers before the fall of communism. By turns humorous, wise, eloquent and humanistic, Škvorecký's fiction deals with several themes: the horrors of totalitarianism and repression, the expatriate experience, the miracle of jazz.