TONY BRINKLEY (Pittsburgh, 1948) is a Professor of English at the University of Maine. He has translated extensively modern Russian, German and French poetry. His poetry and translations have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, The New Review of Literature, Cerise Press, Drunken Boat, Shofar, May Day, World Literature Today, Otoliths and Poetry Salzburg Review. He is the author of Stalin’s Eyes (Puckerbrush Press) and the co- editor with Keith Hanley of Romantic Revisions (Cambridge University Press).
JUDIT ANTÓNIA FARKAS (Budapest, 1969) received her degree in Hungarian and English language and literature from Eötvös Loránd University in 1997. In 2011 she completed her PhD dissertation entitled Szép könyvek kultusza. Bibliofil könyvkultúra Magyarországon, 1919–1949 (The Cult of the Fine Book. Bibliophile Book Culture in Hungary, 1919–1949). In 2007 she edited a book on the publisher and politician Ferenc B. Farkas. Recently she has published a catalogue on the children’s book illustrator Anna F. Györffy. She is presently a research fellow at Veritas Research Institute.
TIBOR FRANK is Professor of History at the Department of American Studies of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. He has been doing research on transatlantic migrations, international relations, imagology, historiography, modern Hungarian and Habsburg history. A Fulbright visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and UCLA (1987–90), and a recurrent visiting professor at Columbia University, NY, he was recipient of the Humboldt Award (Germany, 2002). Tibor Frank was elected to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2013.
MÁRTA GEDEON (Hatvan, 1951) is a lecturer of the Department of Hungarian Studies at Warsaw University. She is the author of numerous articles on the problems of teaching Hungarian as a foreign language published in the online quarterly Őrszavak. She was Head of Adorján Divéky Sunday School in Warsaw for 15 years. She has recently edited a book of Hungarian folk tales in Polish. Her contribution received many awards in Hungary and in Poland.
GEORGE GÖMÖRI (Budapest, 1934) has been living in England since November 1956. After studies in Oxford, he taught at the University of California (Berkeley), then researched at Harvard. From 1969 to 2001 he taught at the University of Cambridge. He published many books on Polish and Hungarian literature; also numerous books of poetry in Hungarian and several in English. He is a member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (Cracow). His recent publication, The Alien in the Chapel. Poems and Letters by Ferenc Békássy (Skyscraper Books), was edited with his wife, Mari Gömöri.
JOHN O’SULLIVAN (Liverpool, 1942) is editor-at-large of National Review in New York where he served as Editor-in-Chief for ten years. He was a Special Adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street and later assisted her in the writing of her two volumes of memoirs. He has held a wide variety of senior editorial positions in the media on both sides of the Atlantic. He is the founder and co-chairman of the Atlantic Initiative, an international bipartisan organisation dedicated to reinvigorating and expanding the Atlantic community of democracies, launched at the Congress of Prague in May 1996 by President Václav Havel and Lady Thatcher. His book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister (on Pope John Paul II, President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher), was published in Hungarian too, in 2010. Until 2011, he was the Executive Editor of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Prague. Currently he is the President of the Danube Institute, Budapest.
NICHOLAS T. PARSONS is a freelance author, translator and editor based in Vienna. A graduate of New College, Oxford, he spent two years in Italy teaching at the British Institute of Florence and as Reader in English at the University of Pisa before returning to the UK to work in publishing for ten years in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1984 he settled in Central Europe with his Hungarian wife, the art historian Ilona Sármány, and has since published some 17 books on cultural topics, writing also as Louis James. These include the Blue Guide Austria and the Blue Guide Vienna as well as the first English guide to Hungary to be published following the “system change” of 1989. His essay-length Xenophobe’s Guide to the Austrians (Louis James) has been in print for 20 years. His recent books are Worth the Detour: A Cultural History of the Guidebook from Pausanias to the Rough Guide, and Vienna: A Cultural and Literary History (Signal Books / Oxford University Press). His latest work is A New Devil’s Dictionary: Lexicon for Contrarians, a reformulation for our times of Ambrose Bierce’s satirical take on disingenuous language.
TONY REEVY is the Senior Associate Director of the Institute for the Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a graduate of North Carolina State University, UNC-Chapel Hill and Miami University. He is a David P. Morgan Award winner (2006) and a Pushcart Prize nominee. His previous publications include poetry, non-fiction and short fiction, including the non-fiction books Ghost Train!, O. Winston Link: Life Along the Line and The Railroad Photography of Jack Delano, the poetry chapbooks Green Cove Stop, Magdalena, Lightning in Wartime and In Mountain Lion Country, and the full books of poetry, Old North and Passage. His next book, Socorro, is pending publication from Iris Press. He resides in Durham, North Carolina with wife, Caroline Weaver, and children Lindley and Ian.
CSABA SZAJLAI, journalist, head of the economy desk of Echo TV channel, anchor of several television and radio programmes. After graduation in Budapest, he studied on a grant in the German Federal Republic. On American invitation, he studied the preparation of the Transatlantic Agreement in Washington and Charleston. He specialises in the systemic questions of finance and macroeconomics. His hobbies are road cycling and mountain climbing. In his free time, he manages his family farm.
E. SYLVESTER VIZI is the former President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) and leading researcher at its Institute of Experimental Medicine. Professor Vizi is an internationally renowned authority on neuroscience and one of the most widely quoted Hungarian scientists in the world. He has been an honorary doctor of several foreign universities and academies, a member of various scientific societies, Professor Emeritus of Semmelweis Medical University, President of the Society for Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge, President of the Hungarian Atlantic Council, and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Friends of Hungary Foundation. His wide- ranging activities span scientific research, science education, and the dissemination of scientific knowledge, as well as various tasks related to the improvement of Hungary’s involvement in the international arena and the furthering of the country’s reputation. This same overarching connective function is echoed in the titles of his books, A tudás hídjai [Bridges of Knowledge (2005)], Láthatatlan hidakon át [Across Invisible Bridges (2008)], and his book with Cardinal Péter Erdő and late Chief Rabbi József Schweitzer: Hit, erkölcs, tudomány [in German: Glaube, Ethik, Wissenschaft (2006)]. The distinguished researcher and public figure has described his own evolution as a story of identifying the pillars supporting bridges, ways in which academia and the success of Hungary’s scientists can make a positive contribution to the national image, and the role of the Friends of Hungary Foundation.