BIOGRAPHY

František Emmert was born in 1974 in Brno into the family of a music composer and professor at the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts, Franz Gregor Emmert. His father's family came from the town of Weiden in Bavaria, and his mother's family from Teplice in Bohemia. His paternal ancestors worked for generations as glass makers on the German side of the Šumava Mountains (Bohemian Forest). His mother came from a family of tradesmen who owned a family confectioner's shop in Teplice before 1948.

After graduating from high school, František Emmert studied history and law. In 2011 he obtained the title Doctor of Law at the Faculty of Law of Charles University in Prague.

In 1992-2006 he worked as a journalist, broadcaster and book editor. He passed through Czech Broadcasting, the newspapers Rovnost, Právo and ZNnoviny/Slovo and Czech News Agency. In 2009-2011 he worked as a spokesperson for the Supreme Administrative Court in Brno.

He dedicated himself to writing books in 2001. His first two works of fiction were published in 2003 and 2004. He won recognition by the time he started writing nonfiction works about modern European and Czech history. In 2005 the publishing house Vyšehrad published his first book in the non-fiction collection Czechs in the Wehrmacht, which was soon reprinted and gained popularity with readers and experts.

Many narrative publications followed - called museums in a book - that panoramically map the key events of the 20th century. These publications in large format differ from classical books thanks to their superior graphic design and legibility of the texts. They contain a large number of photographs, and separately printed appendices - facsimiles of archival material and DVDs with contemporary radio broadcastings. They serve among other things as teaching aids in schools. As of 2012, František Emmert has prepared a total of nine of them. Some of his books have been reprinted, won prestigious awards or were translated into English (The Holocaust). The publication Fateful Eights in Our History won the grand prize of E. E. Kisch from Association of Writers in 2009.   

František Emmert is also an author of other books, including technical legal literature, he is the co-author of a high school textbook of social science and an author of commentaries and journalistic contributions in the daily press and expert articles and studies in the domains of history, law and international politics in technical papers and in collections.

He contributed as an expert adviser on the preparation of the spectacular Czech historical film Lidice (2011).