I first met Ilya Bohac in the union bar at University College London in September 1968, just after the Soviet Union crushed the Prague Spring initiated by Alexander Dubcek's reformist government. Ilya, who has died of cancer aged 65, had been a promising journalist in Prague. He was on holiday in Cornwall when the Soviet tanks rolled into the Czech capital, and he decided to remain in Britain, living with his uncle in Stanmore, north-west London. His life had changed forever.
Ilya became an honorary member of my family and, in a small way, my parents became a substitute for his own, whom he did not see again until the fall of communism in 1989. His parents were a remarkable couple: his Czech father was an educationist and a former partisan; his German mother had fled with her family from Berlin in the 1930s.
Ilya had been born and educated in Prague. He trained with the daily paper Mlada Fronta, and with Die Volkszeitung, a German paper published in Prague, for whom he interviewed, among others, the writer Günter Grass. Ilya went on to study psychology in Bratislava and resumed his studies as a graduate student at UCL.
As well as Czech, he spoke English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian, and became an outstanding teacher of English as a foreign language for 40 years at St Giles College in Brighton. He shared an interest in opera with Jane Findlay, a singer and teacher – they met in 1977 and married in 1990. This led him to a second career as translator and coach for companies staging Czech operas.
From his base in Lewes, East Sussex, he worked extensively with Glyndebourne and the Brighton Festival Chorus and also with the Royal Opera House, the Welsh National Opera and opera companies in Geneva and Lisbon. He coached international singers including Dame Felicity Lott, Willard White, Eva Randova, Sir John Tomlinson, Kim Begley, Felicity Palmer and Ryland Davies; and worked on recordings of Czech and Moravian songs with Philip Langridge and Frances Bourne. His advice was also sought by conductors such as Sir Andrew Davies and Jiri Belohlavek and directors including Sir Trevor Nunn and Nikolas Lehnhoff.
In his youth Ilya had been an outstanding sportsman in track and field events, winning inter-school competitions at 400m, 800m and 1500m, and becoming Prague junior champion in discus, as well as a member of AC Praha 1890, one of the oldest athletic clubs in Czechoslovakia. His sporting prowess gave him a resilience during recent years of illness that was an inspiration to his many friends.
He is survived by Jane and their two daughters, Olivia and Anna, and by his sister, Sylvie, and brother, Kostya.