Denisa Šedivá Haubertová (*1978) studied Public and Social Policy at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University Prague, with a half-year scholarship in media and racial equality studies at Middlesex University London. After graduating, she was involved in promoting and coordinating Czech and international non-profit projects focussed on the integration of minorities (People in Need, Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees), working at the Office of the Government of the Czech Republic in a team promoting the European Union, and preparing selected projects for the 2009 Czech Presidency of the Council of the EU, such as the Opening ceremony at the National Theatre and the Holocaust Era Assets Conference, which resulted in the establishment of the European Shoah Legacy Institute. From 2010 she worked as a consultant and PR and marketing manager for selected projects (Forman brothers, Candole Partners, Pilsen 2015 – European City of Culture). With the photographer Herbert Slavík, she is a co-author of the Pilsner Icon project. Since 2012 she and her husband have lived in Brussels. In 2013 she published the book Me and Yoga or a Safe Way to Motherhood (graphic design and illustrations by Adam Macháček and Sebastien Bohner), which was named Most Beautiful Czech Book of the Year 2013 in the field of textbooks and didactic materials by the Ministry of Culture and the Museum of Czech Literature, as well as receiving the Best Graphic Design award from LIDU Publishing. Since 2015, Denisa Sediva has been working on ABCZ or All you Need to Know about Czechia and the Czechs. The book was published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic in 2018. It was also awarded as the most beautiful Czech textbook of 2018.

After a one-year stay in Prague, when she was promoting the book in the Czech Republic and abroad and leading Velvet Prague workshops at the Václav Havel Library, she returned to Brussels. She is working on the creation of the ABCZ brand, preparing a thematic memory game and a travelling exhibition of posters, and slowly getting ready for the next book. It will be about Czech women.

Thank you!

Thank you to everyone who worked with me on both books!

First of all, I thank my husband Jiří Šedivý for his continuous support. In the production of the ABCZ book I thank Martina Vašíčková and Petra Havránková (editing and proofreading) and Helen Bloom and Therese Turner (editing and proofreading the English translation) for their selfless professional help. And for their patience, I thank translators Robert Russell and Ivan Gutierrez, who, like me, were caught in the time trap of this book. I thank the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the State Culture Fund of the Czech Republic for their financial support, and Dagmar Havel for kindly allowing me to reprint Václav Havel’s fairy tale Telephone. The biggest thanks go to Adam Macháček and Sébastien Bohner. Without them, the book would never have been what it is.

And this is also the case with the book We and Yoga. There I would also like to thank Roman Franc for the great photographs and yoga and meditation teacher Tereza Cíchová for her professional support and help. And to the Yogame studio for providing us with a beautiful space.