A novelist, translator and since 1969 a professor of literature in Toronto, where in 1971 he founded and ran the biggest Czech publishing house in exile – 68 Publishers – with his wife, Zdena Salivarová. This has published over 200 titles.
His first novel, Zbabělci (The Cowards ), was written shortly after the war. It could not be published until 1958, but it was immediately withdrawn from shops and libraries because of its disparaging attitude toward the uprising in May 1945. Even in this early work, elements appear that can be found throughout Škvorecký’s oeuvre. Besides the autobiographical character Danny, these include such things as sparkling, authentic, terse dialogue in which most of the information remains unsaid, or distinctive language using non-standard Czech and various “Czechified” Anglicisms. This can also be observed in his novel Příběh inženýra lidských duší (The Engineer of Human Souls, Toronto 1977).