Meetings with Remarkable People
Description:... Voyen Koreis was born at Pitt Street, near Kensington Palace in London. His father, Dalibor Korejs, was an employee of the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry before the Second World War. During the war, as a Major of the Czechoslovak Army Abroad based in the United Kingdom, he took part in several war missions in Africa and in Yugoslavia. In 1947-48 he was a trade attaché in Belgrade, and in 1948 he was named Consul General in Berlin, where he died in 1950.After his father's death Koreis lived with his mother Antonie Korejsová in Prague. He attended a Grammar School in Jilemnice. During his compulsory army service he was a singer with the Army Entertainment Unit, where he met with a number of future personalities of the Czech cultural scene. Later he was active as a singer and actor with a cabaret group, he also began to study operatic singing. However, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact Armies in 1968 he decided to move to Great Britain in 1969.With his Czech-born wife whom he had later met in England, he migrated to Australia in 1973 and has since been living in Brisbane, Queensland. In Australia he made a living first as a storeman, salesman, later as antiquarian bookseller, while also working for the government as interpreter and translator. He helped to found an ethnic radio station, where he led the broadcasting in Czech, also moderating some English programmes. Koreis is also active as a journalist. In Australia Koreis also became a visual artist, having held several one-man-shows as a painter and ceramic sculptor. ? he made several trips to the newly formed Czech Republic, coming back with commissions for translating TV programmes, both into the Czech and English languages. This made him concentrate more on writing and translating. Koreis' short works, essays and columns, began to appear in Czech Internet news and literary magazines in 1996 and are still being published now. More recently, Koreis had also produced radio programmes for the Czech classical music station Vltava.
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