Ferenc Barnás: Another Death (excerpt from the novel)

Barnás has found an authentic viewpoint and a language that is unique in contemporary fiction to trace that "other life" underneath the life of each of us.

Dezső Tandori

Portrait

The poet whose first two volumes initiated a radical process of renewal within modern Hungarian poetry was born on December 8 1938. What we know about him is minimal: he was born and educated in Budapest, and was taught during his grammar school years by the poet Ágnes Nemes Nagy, who so to speak introduced him to literary society.

Brücke Berlin Prize to Darvasi and his translator

László Darvasi and his translator Heinrich Eisterer were presented with this year's Brücke Berlin Prize for the novel The Legend of the Tear Showmen last Friday in the Altes Museum in Berlin.

Hungarian poets in Dublin

Poets from six central European countries were invited to take part in one of the opening events of the Dublin Writers Festival which takes place from June 17-20.

Péter Esterházy awarded German Book Trade Peace Prize

Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy has been selected as this year's winner of the Peace Prize of the Association of German Publishers and Booksellers.

Three Hungarian novels on UNESCO translation list

Three Hungarian novels have been selected by UNESCO to be recommended on the organization's website to publishers and potential sponsors for translation: Aranysárkány (Golden Dragon) by Dezso Kosztolányi , Hollóido (Time of the Crow) by István Szilágyi and Napraforgó (Sunflower) by Gyula Krúdy.

Hungarian Wine

"Wine is a man thing; one must talk about it softly. The best way to do that is with a glass of wine. When I'm old I want a wine cellar. I have strongly decided that. I do not want anything else from life."

Lake Huron (Excerpt)

"She was astonished, continuously, astonished into the telephone, and up there in the castle when we met, what made you think of me, she asked, she was beautiful, her body an hourglass, measuring disappeared time..."

The Building (Excerpt)

"That night, when the aged dream-sentinel rouses the emperor, a predatory dragon fills the sky and thieves the light from the stars. The monarch blinks sleepily into the dream-sentinel's eyesockets for a few moments, then he shouts for the guard."

The monster is still with you

An interview with László Darvasi

As Erno Szív I write two types of feuilleton, one is about 40 to 45 lines of rambling stuff that appears six times a month. The other is more like a short story in a national literary weekly. I wrote the children's novel against depression. It worked - I can recommend the method to anybody.

László Darvasi

Portrait

"...if there were no words, sentences, if there were no poems or novels, there would be no life."

An Island of Sound

Hungarian Poetry and Fiction Before and Beyond the Iron Curtain

Would I be willing to write a review of this ground-breaking anthology of Hungarian literature in English translation, the editor of HLO asked. "No" was my instant reply, I simply couldn't. It would be simpler to write about why I could not. A foolish reflex. Why not write about why not was the response.

A Book of Memories (Excerpt)

"There was no doubt of it, the dark coat on the rack could mean only one thing: a guest had arrived, an unusual guest at that, because the coat was stern-looking, grim, quite unlike the coat that usually hung on that rack, so shabby, and threadbare I didn't even feel like doing what I usually did when left alone with strange coats in the hallway and go through the pockets and, if I found some loose change, cling to the wall, listen for noises, wait for the right moment, and then steal a few fillers or forints."

Interest in these "distant" cultures

Simon Corrigan

In common with most British schoolchildren, I didn't receive much grounding in Hungarian literature. Even when, in my teenage years, I started exploring the literature of other (and in those days Hungary was particularly 'other') European cultures, Hungary was conspicuous by its absence.