Ten individuals and two organisations today received the Gratias Agit award for spreading the good name of the Czech Republic abroad. The awards were given out by Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky at the seat of the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Prague’s Czernin Palace.
The laureates include Jana Beranova, a poet, translator and activist residing in the Netherlands, Jana Fischerova, a university lecturer and promoter of the Czech language in Ireland, and French political scientist and historian Jacques Rupnik.
The Gratias Agit awards also went to: Helena Leheckova, a philologist, neuro-linguist and lecturer working at the University of Helsinki in Finland; Gabriel C. Salvia, chair of the Argentinian non-profit organisation CADAL; professor of constitutional law Michael Paul Seng; Holocaust survivor Alexander Speiser, an information and communications technology entrepreneur and former chairman of the Israeli-Czech Chamber of Commerce; Czech soprano Eva Urbanova; Herbert Werner, the first German co-director of the Czech-German Fund for the Future and a former long-time MP; and historian and writer George Edward Scott, who has promoted the legacy of Czechoslovak war veterans, and will receive the prize in London in November.
The organisations receiving the award are the Slovak folklore group Slovacky kruzek a Skalicany, and the Tokyo University of International Studies.
More than half of the laureates received the award in person today, including Professor Taku Shinohara who came from the University of Tokyo, accompanied by lecturer Marketa Bruna Gebhart.
The Czech Foreign Ministry has presented Gratias Agit (“expressing thanks”) awards annually since 1997, to people and organisations that have promoted the good name of the Czech Republic abroad, regardless of their nationality. So far, more than 300 individuals and organisations have received this award, including a diploma, and this year also the newly-designed prize shaped like a crystal block.
