Marek, Jiří

Czech author, journalist and teacher, born in Prague in 1914 as Josef Jiří Puchwein. In 1946, he officially changed his name to Jiří Marek, which he had used as a pseudonym since 1937. At the end of the 1930s, he studied languages – German and Czech – at Karls-Universität in Prague, and graduated in 1940. After the Second World War, he became a member of the Communist Party, and taught at a teacher-training college in Soběslav, but in 1948 became a journalist at the party newspaper Rudé parvo (Red justice) and later the editor of the magazine Svět sovětů (Soviet world).