Ota Filip
Ota Filip was a Czech and German novelist and journalist.
Life
Ota Filip was born in Slezská Ostrava, in Czechoslovakia, the present-day Czech Republic. His father, Bohumil Filip, was Czech, and his mother, Marie Filipová, née Mikolajczik, was Polish. His works have been translated into French, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, Slovenian and English, among others. During the communist era government of Czechoslovakia his works were banned or censored by the authorities. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact Armed Forces in 1968, he was sentenced for his dissident activities, and incarcerated from 1969–70. In 1974, Ota Filip along with his wife Marie Filip and their two children, Pavel and Hana, were forced to emigrate to West Germany.They arrived in Munich, West Germany, on 10 July 1974, where Ota Filip and his wife lived until 1994, when they moved to Grafenaschau. In 1998 they
settled in Murnau am Staffelsee. His son, Pavel Filip, was a professor of mathematics at the Bochum University, while his daughter, Hana Filip, moved to the United States, where she received her PhD in Linguistics and worked as a university professor of linguistics/semantics. Currently, she is a senior full professor of semantics at the Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf.
From 1975 Ota Filip was a member of the Bavarian Academy of Arts and Sciences, Munich, Germany. He was awarded a number of literary awards in Germany and the Czech Republic, including the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize for German writing by a non-native German speaker.
On 28 October 2012 Ota Filip was awarded the National Medal of Merit in Fine Arts, a merit awarded to distinguished Czech artists by the Czech government on the occasion of the anniversary of the founding of the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1918.
On 27 March 2024 Ota Filip was awarded the Prize of the City of Ostrava for his contribution to the cultural development of Ostrava.
Ota Filip died on 2 March 2018 in the hospital of Garmisch-Partenkirchen of complications of pneumonia, with his daughter Hana by his side. His wife, Marie Filip, died from an aggressive form of lung cancer, on 31 December 2014, in the Klinikum Rechts der Isar, Technische Universität Munich, Comprehensive Cancer Center.