Publisher Zdena Salivarova kept Czech and Slovak literature alive through her publishing house in Canada

Writer and publisher Zdena Salivarova, who died of respiratory complications in Toronto’s Hennick Bridgepoint Hospital on Aug. 25 at the age of 91, became an iconic figure in Czech and Slovak literature and a legend among her countrymen and countrywomen.

At a time when her homeland was under Soviet occupation, she published, from modest offices in her adopted city of Toronto, over 200 original titles by authors who had been banned or driven into exile. The company she founded in 1971 with the support of her husband, novelist Josef Skvorecky, was not only a lifeline to its writers and a beacon of hope to its readers, it was an act of defiance, one of the many that helped, in the end, to undermine the regime.