(source: ČTK)
SLOVAK writer Vojtech Zamarovský, who rose to fame thanks to non-fiction books about ancient and pre-ancient societies, was born on October 5, 1919, in Zamarovce, today a part of the town of Trenčín, making 2009 the 90th anniversary of his birth.
He was noteworthy of writing in an arresting style stories of the very earliest days of mankind. Zamarovský authored fourteen books altogether and the first one, a “historical travel book” published in 1960 entitled Quest of the Seven Wonders of the World, shot him to fame in Czechoslovakia. His other works included Gods and Heroes of Ancient Myths, Gods and Kings of Ancient Egypt, Quest of the Mystery of the Empire of Hittites, At the Beginning, It Was Sumer, Discovery of Troy, History Written by Rome, or Resurrection of Olympia.
Vojtech Zamarovský is the descendant of an old family of minor gentry, which dates back to the 12th century, the ČTK newswire wrote. He graduated in law and economy and started to write more or less by accident. He had been fascinated by ancient times ever since childhood, but the impetus to write his own works came only when he was sacked from the State Planning Office for political reasons in the 1950s. From 1946 he lived in Prague, where he died on July 27, 2006, and from the first half of the 1960s he wrote in both Czech and in Slovak. His friends used to joke that after Ján Kollár and Pavol Jozef Šafárik, he was only the third real Czecho-Slovak bi-linguist. Apart from other activities, he also translated from German, English, French and Latin into Czech and Slovak.
