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Documentary and film director Jan Kaplan, who has been living and creating in Great Britain for many decades, met Bohumil Hrabal in the 1960s as a student in the writer's residence at 24 Na Hrázi street in Libeň, which he visited with a classmate Michal Ajvaz. Back then, Kaplan had no idea that in 1990 he would serve as Hrabal's guide in London. Today, the Czech-British director remembers this extraordinary day as if it were only yesterday. He has the same feeling when he remembers the last meeting with the writer in autumn 1996 in the pub U Zlatého tygra, where he photographed Bohumil Hrabal at his usual table. His portrait hangs in the beer hall to this day and is one of the many previously unpublished pictures that readers will find in this book, published on the centenary of Hrabal's birth. Documentary filmmaker and film director Jan Kaplan (born February 25, 1949 in Prague) has lived in London since 1968. Here he also studied at the London School of Film Technique and from 1972 he directed a number of documentary films. Among the most successful are The Double Agent Graham Greene (1975), The Shine and the Trouble of the Royal Families (1981), The Garden of Mr. Rothschild (1982), How the Rabbi Went to Oxford (1989), SS-3: The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (1992), Sarajevo Assassination (1996) and The Diamond King (2010). He received numerous prestigious awards for his work, including in Tokyo, at the New York Film Festival and at the Chicago Film Festival (honorable mention for SS-3). He has been a member of the British Academy of Film and Television (BAFTA) since 1983. He is the co-author of the publications Prague in the Shadow of the Hook (with Professor Callum MacDonald), Prague: The Turbulent Century (with Krystyna Nosarzewska) and Traveller's Companion to Prague. In 1995, he organized the extensive exhibition Prague in the Shadow of the Swastika and is the author of the permanent exhibition of the Museum of Communism in Prague. In 2012, he created a large-scale video installation called 10:35, produced by the Center for Contemporary Art DOX. Since the beginning of the 90s of the last century, he has worked closely on most projects with his wife Krystyna, a director and producer. They are currently preparing a live historical film, which will be shot in the Czech Republic in an international co-production.