Jan Drabek was born in Prague in 1935; he came to Canada in 1965, after 17 years in the U.S., India, Austria, and Germany. He received a B.A. in English literature from American University in Washington, D.C. He taught high school in Vancouver for 10 years during the 1960s and 1970s, then wrote fiction and non-fiction until 1989. Since 1990, he has been working for the Foreign Ministry of Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic as an ambassador to Kenya, advisor to the Minister and Chief of Protocol. In the late 1990s he served as the Czech ambassador in Tirana, Albania, but has now returned to Vancouver where he devotes all his time to writing, both in English and Czech. He is the former three-time President of the Federation of B.C. Writers.