Josef Škvorecký, a former Czech dissident writer who spent much of his adult life in Canada but continued to support fellow authors back in Czechoslovakia, died in Toronto early on Tuesday morning of cancer at the age of 87. Along with his wife, actress and fellow émigré writer Zdena Salivarová, he founded the legendary 68 Publishers group (Sixty-Eight Publishers, Corp.) a few years after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia that brought an end to what came to be known as the Prague Spring. Škvorecký was a prolific novelist and poet, whose fiction — banned by the Communists in his homeland — examined the horrors of totalitarianism and repression at the hands of the state, the expatriate experience and jazz.
