MELINDA BÁNYÁSZ (PhD) – professor of English and Hungarian – was born in 1977 in Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca, Romania). She completed her studies in Hungarian Language and Literature, and English Language and Literature, at Babeș-Bolyai University, in her native city. She defended her doctoral thesis in 2013 at the same university, her research field being Kelemen Mikes’s prose fiction in his Letters, and the problems of prose fiction translation in his adaptation into Hungarian of Madame Gomez’s Les Journals amusantes under the title Mulatságos Napok.
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 for Industry and Trade between 1990 and 1991, then 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 [Entre-preneurial state], 1987; A pénz világa [The world of money], 2001; Gazdaságpolitika [Economic policy], 2002; Közgazdaságtan [Economics], 2006.
CHRISTOPHER COLLINS is director of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation and editor of its vast archive website, www.margaretthatcher.org. His background is that of an academic historian. He was a lecturer in politics at Lincoln College, Oxford, then assisted Margaret Thatcher in the writing of her memoirs 1992–95 before becoming editor of her 14 million words of public statements, published by Oxford University Press in 1998. He is married and lives in Edinburgh.
CLAYTON ESHLEMAN (Indianapolis, 1935). Poet and essayist. He is the author of some 30 books, including The Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader (Black Widow Press, 2008), Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld (Wesleyan University Press, 2003) and the translator of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo (University of California Press, 2007). He received the National Book Award in 1979 for his translations of the poetry of Cesar Vallejo. He was founding editor of the famous literary magazines Caterpillar (1967–73) and Sulfur (1981–2000). His recent publications are CE / The Essential Poetry 1960–2015 (Black Widow Press) and A Sulfur Anthology (Wesleyan U Press). He lives with his wife Caryl in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Clayton Eshleman’s work in former issues of Hungarian Review: Ferenc Juhász, Biography of a Woman (translation, January 2013), and five poems reprinted from Under World Arrest, 1994 (September 2014).
GYÖRGY GRANASZTÓI (Budapest, 1938). Historian, college professor, director of the Hungarian–French Atelier for the Humanities and of the doctoral school at ELTE BTK, and former Director General of the László Teleki Institute. He is a recipient of the Charles Simonyi scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His field of expertise is the history of humanities. Besides the history of the city and the history of population growth, he published essays about the transition to democracy. He is a doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA). Between 1990 and 1994, he was ambassador for the Antall government to NATO and the European Union, and later to the Belgian Monarchy (2007). He was elected to the French Légion d’honneur in 2009.
IAIN LINDSAY, OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), was appointed Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Hungary on 30 March 2016. He previously held the position of Her Majesty’s Ambassador in Manama from 2011 to 2015. Mr Lindsay has spent much of his career in Asia Pacific, serving in Tokyo (twice), Hong Kong and Canberra. He was Deputy Head of Mission and Political Counsellor in Bucharest 2003-2007, working on Romania’s accession to NATO and the EU. Prior to that he served as a foreign policy adviser to the Romanian Foreign Minister. He was Deputy Head of Mission and Director of Trade and Investment at the British Consulate General in Hong Kong 2007-11. The Queen awarded him an OBE in 2002.
JÁNOS MARTONYI (Kolozsvár/Cluj,1944). University professor (University of Szeged; ELTE University, Budapest; College of Europe, Bruges and Natolin; Central European University, Budapest), politician, attorney, international arbitrator, author of numerous books, essays and articles primarily in the field of international trade law, competition policy and law, European integration and law, cooperation in Central Europe, global regulations and international relations. Commissioner for privatisation in 1989–1990; State Secretary in the Ministry of International Economic Relations in 1990–1991, State Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1991–1994, managing partner at the law firm Martonyi and Kajtár, Baker & McKenzie, Budapest in 1994–1998 and 2002–2009, Head of the Institute for Private International Law and International Trade Law at the University of Szeged in 1999–2009, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Hungary in 1998–2002 and 2010–2014.
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 Advisor 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.
PANNI PALÁSTI graduated from Eötvös Loránd University in 1956. She entered the United States as a refugee and continued her studies at Columbia, San Francisco State and UCLA. She worked as a teacher and journalist in California before sailing with her husband and son to New Zealand in 1973. For 28 years she lived in Russell, where she started the Russell Writers’ Workshop and founded and edited Russell Review before moving to the South Island. She has been writing poems since first grade. Her work has been published in Europe, the United States and in New Zealand.
JOHN RIDLAND was born in 1933 in London, England, of Scottish ancestry. He calls himself an Anglo-Californian immigrant. He received a PhD in English Literature at Claremont Graduate School in 1964. Before finishing the degree, he began teaching at UC Santa Barbara, which remained his base for 43 years. Since retiring in 2004–05 he has been writing and translating widely, publishing his own poems in Happy in an Ordinary Thing (2013) and various magazines including The Hudson Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, River Styx and Per Contra (online, Issue 31). In 1999 Corvina Press published his translation of Petőfi’s János Vitéz as John the Valiant, with thirty illustrations by Peter Meller, for which he has received the Gold Medal of the Arpad Academy in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Bálint Balassi Sword Award. With Peter Czipott he has translated a volume of poems by Sándor Márai, The Withered World (Alma Classics, London, 2013) and another by Miklós Radnóti, All That Still Matters at All (New American Press, 2014).
GYŐZŐ VÖRÖS is an architectural historian and Egyptologist, who has been living and working in the Middle East for the past twenty years. He started his studies at Eötvös Loránd University at the age of 16 and received his degree in Egyptology at the age of 21. He was the director of excavations at Taposiris Magna from 1998 to 2004, and was appointed director of the Royal Archaeological Institute in Jordan in 2009. Since then he has been directing archaeological excavations in the fortified Herodian Royal Palace of Machaerus. In 2013 he became Director of Research and honorary member of the Mississippi State University. Currently, he is Visiting Professor at the Pontifical Faculty of Biblical Sciences and Archaeology in Jerusalem.