In 1997 he returned permanently to Prague, where he works as an external teacher. Winner of the Egon Hostovský Prize.
Particularly during the period 1969–1989 Jaroslav Vejvoda (who before emigrating wrote short stories and journalistic texts and also tried his hand at his first, unpublished novel) was regarded as a typical representative of the new Czech exile literature – an author who brought out his first book in exile and therefore contributed to the form of this offshoot of Czech writing. His short-story debut, Plující andělé, letící ryby, brought him much acclaim, with the author becoming the first recipient of the Egon Hostovský Prize for exile literature. Vejvoda gradually became a living classic in the subject matter which was crucial to our exile output: he focused, from an everyday, almost documentary, civilian viewpoint, on portraying the fates of our compatriots living abroad after August 1968 (mostly having fled from the regime). Vejvoda also interpreted this theme in his other books, both in novels (Osel aneb Splynutí and Zelené víno) and in short stories (Ptáci, and later also Provdaná nevěsta, encompassing the time period up to November and December 1989), through which he became an unbiased, objective chronicler of the psychology and mentality of Czech exiles, especially in Switzerland or in German-speaking Central Europe, i.e. in the countries which he knew best from his own experience. After a creative silence of several years, connected with a period of transition in his life, when the writer decided on a permanent return from Switzerland to his homeland, Vejvoda began (initially still during the final phase of his stay in Zurich) to work on a novel whose completion was ultimately to take him more than six years. The author’s large-scale generational prose work Jezdci nocí, which arches across a great timespan, was from a compositional viewpoint conceived as a cycle of records gradually uncovered from the archives of State Security. On the one hand it represents an original, synthetic recapitulation of the author’s existing key themes of exile and exiles, while on the other hand the writer is evidently gravitating towards the purview of the social novel, examining in particular the fate of the Czech lands in the post-war period (partially, of course, also the period of the protectorate), followed through to the last years of the 20th century. However, if Jaroslav Vejvoda’s exile stories, which above all frequently capture tragi-comic or even tragi-grotesque stories of our fellow countrymen in Switzerland struggling with the problems of cultural (or linguistic) assimilation or adaptation, are based on precise psychological observation and on a refined sense for the thought patterns of the characters (especially those of his generation), in Jezdci nocí all of a sudden it springs from a completely different poetic. That is to say, he makes an attempt at a broadly composed novelist treatment, referring in some respects to techniques of magical realism, while in other aspects also approaching the intellectual attitudes of European literary existentialism. This standpoint gains ground especially in the author’s philosophy of the human individual, thrown to the mercy of the technology of power, the dead ends of history and primarily the labyrinth of his own traumas, which are usually the result, but sometimes even the precursor of an external social labyrinth – a labyrinth manipulating man and stripping him of his experience of private history, particularly of the necessary consciousness of spiritual identity and the higher level of moral integrity which results from it.
