Ludvík Vaculík was born in the Wallachian town of Brumov (Brumov-Bylnice) into the family of a carpenter. He graduated from the Bata School of Labour in Zlín (1941-1943) and from the School of Commerce for Foreign Trade with a diploma there (1944-1946). After the war he studied at the Political and Journalism Faculty of the University of Political and Social Sciences in Prague (1946-1950). From 1948 he worked as an educator in a boarding school in Benešov nad Ploučnicí, from where he moved to Prague (1950), where he started as an educator (1950-1951), editor of Rudy Pravy ( 1953-1957) and editor of the weekly Beseda Rural Family ( 1957-1958). In 1949 he married Marie Komárková, and their sons Martin, Ondřej and Jan were born.

At the end of the 1950s, he began working in the youth radio broadcast of Czechoslovak Radio in Prague (1958-1965). In addition to Literarni noviny ( 1965-1969), from the late 1960s he contributed to a number of domestic and foreign periodicals, both official and samizdat ( Svědectví in Paris, Listy in Rome, etc.).

In 1977 he became one of the first signatories of Charter 77. In the 1970s and 1980s, when he was silenced and not allowed to publish officially, he founded one of the most influential samizdat editions , Edice Petlice. After 1989, his samizdat works began to be published publicly. His literary work has been awarded many honours, including the George Orwell Prize and the Egon Hostovsky Prize. In 2010 he was awarded the Ferdinand Peroutka Prize.

Ludvík Vaculík worked in the Bata factories in 1941-1946, first in Zlín and from the beginning of December 1944 to mid-1945 in Zruč nad Sázavou - Bata, from where he returned to Zlín. Vaculík arrived in Zruč with a group of other Zlín employees who were to strengthen the Zruč production after the bombing of the Zlín plants in November 1944. Vaculík missed the Zlín infrastructure in Zruč: "I am becoming dissatisfied here. Because there is neither a reading room, nor a reading room, simply not even a bit of space where there would be some quiet to read or write" (6 January 1945). However, in Zruč he appreciated the romantic setting of the local castle, the beauty of the Posázava landscape, the quality of the eighty-strong Bata Young Men's Corps, and above all the safer environment, far from the battlefields of the ending Second World War: 'I also remember Zruč. It seems like a fairy tale to me, how we lived there. I think that apart from the feeling of safety that came from the isolation of that part of the world where the war crisis was at its height, it was also the cosiness of the environment and the awareness of belonging to that small world and to that handful of mostly familiar people..."

He recalled the Zlín and Zruč years repeatedly in his literary works, in his later years with a touch of reminiscent optimism: "1985: It was like being behind a furnace in Zruč. If I complain again soon, don't believe me too much: it was an idyll. He had all his friends there, a small factory surrounded by a river, a track under the rocks, clean and quiet. We lived in a factory building, there was rigging above our rooms, there were material cutters banging away until ten o'clock in the evening, and it didn't matter, the work so close overhead gave the impression of order and peace. The heating was good, the mail came in. The war was a little farther away again."

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