ATTILA BALÁZS (Novi Sad/Újvidék, 1955) is a writer, translator and journalist, author of twelve books of prose and founder of the cultural magazine Ex Symposion. He worked as editor for the YU Radio–Television, then moved to Budapest in 1991. For a time he worked as war correspondent, then as political correspondent for the newspaper Pesti Hírlap. In 1994–2012 he was editor of the cultural programmes of the Hungarian Radio. Among many distinctions, he received the Attila József Prize for Literature and the Book of the Year Prize in 1999.
PÉTER ÁKOS BOD (Szigetvár, 1951). Economist, university professor. He worked in economic research at the Institute of Planning, Budapest, taught economics in Budapest and in the US before 1989. He was Minister of Industry and Trade between 1990 and 1991, and Governor of the Hungarian National Bank between 1991 and 1994. In 1995–1998, he was member of the Board at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (London), representing East Central European countries. At present, he is director of the Institute of Economics at Corvinus University of Budapest. He is vice chairman of the Hungarian Economic Society, sits on editorial boards of Hungarian journals (incl. this Review). His major publications include A vállalkozó állam [Entrepreneurial State], 1987; A pénz világa [The World of Money], 2001; Gazdaságpolitika [Economic Policy], 2002; Közgazdaságtan [Economics], 2006.
ALEŠ DEBELJAK (Ljubljana, 1961) graduated from the University of Ljubljana in 1985 with a degree in comparative literature. He obtained his PhD in sociology of culture at Syracuse University in 1989. He became a Senior Fulbright Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and did research at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Collegium Budapest, the Civitella Ranieri Centre and the Bogliasco Liguria Study Centre for the Arts and Humanities. He is currently professor of Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Social Studies of the University of Ljubljana. Besides poetry and cultural criticism, Debeljak has also worked as a columnist for the most important newspaper in Slovenia, Delo. His works include Reluctant Modernity: The Institution of Art and its Historical Forms and The Hidden Handshake: National Identity and Europe in the Post-Communist World.
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.
ÁRPÁD KADARKAY (Kesztölc, 1934) Conscripted into the Hungarian Army, 1954–56, he deserted in November 1956 and joined the Revolution. After the Soviet invasion, he emigrated to Vancouver, British Columbia, in March 1957. While working the graveyard shifts at Eburne Saw Mills, Vancouver, he earned Double Honours at the University of British Columbia, 1958–1963, and on a fellowship, an MA in Political Science at UC Los Angeles, 1963–65, and a PhD in Political Philosophy, at UC Santa Barbara, 1965–1971. He is Emeritus Professor of Politics and Government at the University of Puget Sound, and lives in Tacoma, Washington. His publications include Georg Lukacs: Life, Thought, and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), The Lukacs Reader (Blackwell, 1995), Human Rights in American and Russian Political Thought (University Press of America, 1982), and an English translation of Journey in North America, 1831, by Sándor Bölöni Farkas (Santa Barbara, 1978).
GYULA KODOLÁNYI (Budapest, 1942), Editor-in-Chief of Hungarian Review and of Magyar Szemle, is the author of eleven collections of poetry, scholarly and literary essays and poetry translations. He taught English and American Literature at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest in 1970–1989. He received research and teaching fellowships from the British Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, CIES and The German Marshall Fund of the US. He taught at the University of California in Santa Barbara (1984–85) and at Emory University in Atlanta (2004–2009), and read his poetry in English widely in the US. In 1987, he was a founding member of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). In 1990–94, he served as Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister. In 2000–2005 he was an Advisor to President Ferenc Mádl. In 2012, he received Hungary’s Middle Cross with the Star and in 2005 the President’s Medal of Honour for his public and literary achievements. With Magyar Szemle, he received a Prima Prize in 2003.
JÁNOS MARTONYI (Kolozsvár/Cluj, 1944). A lawyer by profession, he has been active in politics since 1989, first as Government Commissioner for Privatisation, then State Secretary in the Ministry of International Economic Relations, later Foreign Minister in the Fidesz governments of 1998–2002 and 2010–2014. He is also President of the Free Europe Centre for European Integration of the Fidesz Hungarian Civic Union, a member of the Executive Board of the Centre for European Studies, a foundation of the European People’s Party based in Brussels, and a member of the Batthyány Society of Professors.
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 History Signet (Oxford University Press; Italian edition: Vienna: Ritratto di unacitta, Odoya, Bologna).
MÁRIA PROKOPP (Budapest, 1939) has been Professor of Art History at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest since 1995. Her main field of research is European art of the 14th and 15th centuries. She published books on Italian masters like Giotto, Sassetta and Lorenzetti, and on the late Gothic art of Hungary. Almost for forty years, she has conducted research on the mural paintings of the late 15th century Esztergom palace of Archbishop János Vitéz and their Italian Renaissance connections. She is a holder of the Officer’s Rank of the Hungarian Order of Merit (2010).
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.
ALEXANDER STEMP took to writing recently after many visits to the Ukraine Carpathians. During this time, with various photographs, he put together a light, geographical travel guide called The Ukraine Carpathians: Europe’s Last Great Wilderness. After being published in 2011, he received critical acclaim with his book and has returned to Ukraine on a regular basis to make book presentations and to appear as a guest on Ukraine TV. He is currently working on short stories to be published soon.
NORMAN STONE (Glasgow, 1941) is a British historian, former student then lecturer at the University of Cambridge, professor of history at the University of Oxford, and currently professor of International Relations at the University of Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey. He was also an adviser and speech writer to the British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and is the author of many books on twentieth century history, including The Eastern Front 1914–17 (1975), Hitler (1980), Europe Transformed, 1878–1919 (1983), The Other Russia (1990), and The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A Personal History of the Cold War (2010).
MIKLÓS SZÁNTHÓ is a lawyer and political analyst. He graduated as a lawyer from Eötvös Loránd University of Hungary, and is the managing director and head analyst of Centre of Fundamental Rights, a Budapest-based legal research institute. Previously, Szánthó was a political analyst at a Budapest-based thinktank and contributed to several newspaper and political blogs. He also joined domestic and international research projects on the powers and limits of the executive or on higher education policies in England. Szánthó’s core interest is on constitutional law, legal structures of the government and election law. The centre he leads, which was founded in 2013, prepares assessments and research papers on the professional level regarding the functioning of the rule of law and protection of fundamental rights in Hungary.
LÁSZLÓ TRÓCSÁNYI, Minister of Justice of Hungary (since June 2014). Graduate of the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of Eötvös Loránd University (1980), he was admitted to the bar in 1985, while also working as a researcher at the Institute for Legal Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences until 1988. In 1989 he became member of the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of the University of Szeged. Head of department from 2000, Professor Trócsányi also served as Director of the European Studies Centre of Szeged University (from 2004) and chief coordinator of French- language courses in European Law and of International Relations. He was visiting professor at Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 and at the Catholic University of Louvain-la- Neuve (2006–2009). He served as Hungary’s Ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg (2000–2004), and Ambassador to France (2010–2014). He received the Palmes Académiques award from the French government in 1996 and the Grand Officer Class of the Order of Leopold II from Belgium in 2002.