The occupation in August 1968 found him in Paris
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Tomáš Frýbert was born on 6 April 1949 in Prague. After completing secondary school he studied two terms at the Faculty of Law of Charles University. He made his debut as a poet in May 1968 in the journal Nová Praha. The occupation in 1968 found him on a holiday trip to France. In Paris, he founded the Information and Organizational Centre for Czechoslovaks with other Czechoslovak students. At the beginning of September 1968 he returned to Prague to visit his mother. After arriving at the Main Railway Station, he had an unpleasant encounter with Soviet soldiers, so he left Czechoslovakia again on 24 September 1968. In France he studied at the universities of Clermont-Ferrand and Aix-en-Provence. Under the influence of young Czech artists from Paris, especially Petr Král, Vladimíra Čerepková, Vladimír Škoda and Vlasta Šabacká-Voskovcová, he began to write poems intensively. He earned his living in various professions, such as a mover, a bartender in an equestrian club, or later in the printing trade. He lived for a long time in the south of France, in the cities of Marseille and Montpellier. In Montpellier, in the early 1970s, he came into conflict with the French police, who suspected that Czechoslovak emigrants, scientists and engineers working at a research centre in Montpellier were spying for communist Czechoslovakia. According to Frýbert, French intelligence organized and carried out a provocation to disperse the Czech group in Montpellier. Tomáš Frýbert was sentenced to six months in prison. He then headed to Brittany, where he married, and finally settled in the southern Paris suburb of Bagneaux. He has two sons. His poems were published in exile periodicals and publishing houses such as Svědectví and Arkýř, in French literary magazines, and after 1989 in the Czech Republic in Lidové noviny, Humus and Analogon. He has been painting since the 1980s and has participated in ten exhibitions in France and the Czech Republic.
