Hungarian novelist and author of essays and short stories, born in Gyula in 1954, he is one of the most prestigious writers on the international scene. His novels include Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, War & War, Seiobo There Below, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming and Herscht 07769. He has won numerous awards, including the Man Booker International Prize 2015, the US National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019, the highest distinction in Hungary, the Kossuth prize, and in 1993 the prize for best book of the year in Germany for The Melancholy of Resistance. He has twice won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in the United States.
He has also written the shorter works Animalinside, Spadework for a Palace and Chasing Homer. Satantango was longlisted for the British Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2013, and shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He currently lives in retirement in the mountains of Pilisszentlászló.
Image © Hartwig Klappert
