Péter Nádas [ Hungary ]

Péter Nádas, born in Budapest in 1942, lost both of his parents within the space of a few years. His mother died of cancer in 1953, and his father, a communist, resistance fighter and telecommunications engineer, committed suicide in 1958. After leaving school, Nádas began to study in chemistry but then left the course to become a photographer.

In 1961, he began publishing his pictures in the women’s magazine »Nök Lapja«. In 1965, he published the story »Die Bibel« (t: The bible) in a magazine. Set in the Stalinist era, it is the story of a young man who sadistically torments a servant girl. In the mid sixties, Nádas began working as a journalist for the daily newspaper »Pest Megyei Hirlap«, but his reports increasingly ran foul of the totalitarian régime’s official news agency. In 1968, he resigned from his position at the news paper and moved to the country to work as a freelance writer. The publication of his first novel, »Egy családregény vége« (Engl. »The End of a Family Story«, 2000) was delayed for several years by censors, until the book finally appeared 1977. It tells the story of a boy, son of a Hungarian sec ret police officer, who is being raised by his grandparents after his mother’s death. Living under Stalin’s oppressive regime, cracks begin to form in his world view. His story-telling grandfather offers an alternative, allowing the boy to become absorbed in Jewish-biblical myth.

In 1986, after eleven years’ work, he published the sweeping novel, more than one thousand pages long, »Emlékiratok könyve« (Eng. »A Book of Memories«, 2008), which brought him international recognition. Critics hailed the book as era-defining, as »a milestone in European prose« and compared it with the works of Marcel Proust and Robert Musil. In a complex structure containing shifts both of chronology and perspective. The novel is a portrayal of the conflict between an intellectual man’s emotional life and the dehumanizing system in which he lives.

Nádas is still active as a photographer and illustrates some of his books photographically. One such book, published in German as »Spurensicherung« (2007; t: Securing evidence), consists of a collage of texts concerning the interrogation and torture machine of the Hungarian state security service. His book, which Nádas spent eighteen years writing, is now being translated into German and is to be published as »Parallelgeschichten.« It tells the story of a Hungarian family and a German family in the twentieth century. Nádas, who spent a year living in Germany as a guest of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1991), the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding (1995) and many other awards. The author lives in Budapest and Gombosszeg.

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