BERNARD ADAMS was born in 1937 in the Black Country of the English West Midlands. Educated at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, he did his National Service in the regimental band of the Royal Scots Greys, then read Hungarian and Russian at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was awarded an American PEN translation award in 2008, and in the same year won second prize in the John Dryden translation competition in the UK. In 2009 he received a translation award from the Füst Milán Foundation of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has published some 30 titles. In 2006 he moved to Hungary, and now lives at Zánka on the north side of Lake Balaton.
CSILLA BERTHA, Debrecen University, Hungary, honorary chair of the Hungarian Yeats Society, author of Yeats the Playwright (in Hungarian), co-author of Worlds Visible and Invisible, co-edited several volumes on Irish literature, most recently Mirror up to Theatre (2015 Irish University Review special issue). She publishes widely in English and Hungarian on Yeats, contemporary Irish drama, sites of memory in drama, and interart relations in theatre. She has also edited Hungarian poetry in English translation, Homeland in the Heights (Budapest, 2000) and with Donald E. Morse has co-translated Transylvanian Hungarian plays, including the five published as Silenced Voices (Dublin, 2008).
JÁNOS BRENNER (Budapest, 1954) earned his diploma in architecture at the Dresden Institute of Technology in 1976 before obtaining his PhD at the University of Technology of Budapest (1977). In 1984 he was appointed housing and construction assessor in the city of Frankfurt. In 2008 he became honorary professor at the University of Technology of Budapest. He is at present housing and construction director of the Ministry of Transportation, Construction and City Development of Germany.
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.
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.
OTTO HIERONYMI (Budapest, 1938), economist, is Professor of International Relations and former Head (1995–2006) of the International Relations and Migration and Refugee Studies Program at Webster University, Geneva. Between 1966 and 1970 he worked as an international economist at Morgan Guaranty Trust in New York. From 1970 to 1994 he was Senior Economist at Battelle Geneva Research Centers. He earned his Licence and Doctorate in international relations and economics at the Graduate Institute of International Relations (University of Geneva). He was Economic Adviser to Prime Minister József Antall (1990–1993) and member of different committees drafting the Bank Reform and the new strategy for growth (GAM – 1991–1992). In 1989 he became Secretary of the Expert Group on the International Debt issue appointed by the Swiss Federal Government. His publications include among others: Economic Policies for the New Hungary: Proposals for a Coherent Approach (1990 – the so-called “Battelle Report”); Globalization and the Reform of the International Banking and Monetary System (editor, 2009); “Agenda for a New Monetary Reform” (1998); Global Challenges, the Atlantic Community and the Outlook for International Order (editor, 2004); Wilhelm Röpke, the Social Market Economy and Today’s Domestic and International Order (editor, 2002); The Spirit of Geneva in a Globalized World (editor, 2007); Renewing the Western Community: the Challenge for the EU, Europe and Japan (editor, 2016 forthcoming).
CSABA LÁSZLÓFFY (1939–2015), prolific Transylvanian Hungarian poet, prose writer, playwright, essayist, translator, member of the Hungarian Artists’ Academy and recipient of the prestigious Attila József Prize of Hungary, lived in Kolozsvár (old Hungarian city now in Romania). He worked as editor of several cultural and literary journals, and published some 50 volumes of his own work. With a deep sensitivity for the tragedies and absurdities of Hungarian and human history, a moral passion and a grotesque and ironic vision of life, he incessantly experimented to better express the angst and unhomeliness of human existence. He layered, crossed and blended different genres, styles, historical times, figures and events, and highlighted the grotesque and absurd not only in his absurdist plays but also in his poetry and poetic prose.
DONALD E. MORSE, Professor of American, Irish, and English Literature, University of Debrecen and Emeritus Professor of English and Rhetoric, Oakland University, Michigan has been Fulbright Professor (1987–1989, 1991–1993) and Soros Professor (1990, 1996–1997) at the University of Debrecen. The author or editor of 16 books including The Irish Theatre in Transition (Palgrave 2015), Anatomy of Science Fiction (2006), The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut (Praeger 2003) and with Csilla Bertha More Real than Reality: The Fantastic in Irish Literature and the Arts (Greenwood 1991). With Csilla Bertha he received Rockefeller Study and Durrell School Fellowships to translate contemporary Hungarian plays into English (Silenced Voices: Five Hungarian–Transylvanian Plays 2008). For over 30 years he has chaired the annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts and for over 25 years has hosted “Bloom’s Day in Detroit”. In 1999 the University of Debrecen awarded him an Honorary Doctorate and in 2007 he received the László Országh Prize. He has also been the recipient of two festschrifts.
BÉLA NÓVÉ (1956) is a Hungarian writer, historian and documentary film maker living in Budapest. Since the late 1970s he has published a number of books, essays and studies on different themes and contributed to a dozen of documentary films as scriptwriter, interviewer and director. As a devoted researcher of 20th century oral history memoirs during the past decade his interest turned more and more to minority and refugee conflicts and their personal testimonies. A recent result of this is his biography of Ödön Pásint published in Cluj (Kolozsvár, Clausenburg) in Hungarian in 2012, awaiting its English edition. Another result is a thoroughly researched monograph and a documentary film “PATRIA NOSTRA: Minor Hungarian refugees of 1956 in the French Foreign Legion”. Both will be published this year for the 60th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution and the author’s 60th birthday.
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 cochairman 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.
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, UN– 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! and O. Winston Link: Life Along the Line, the poetry chapbooks Green Cove Stop, Magdalena, Lightning in Wartime and In Mountain Lion Country, and the full book of poetry, Old North. His 2015 releases are Passage (poetry; Iris Press), and The Railroad Photography of Jack Delano (Indiana University Press). He resides in Durham, North Carolina with wife Caroline Weaver, and children Lindley and Ian.
ILONA SÁRMÁNY-PARSONS is a Hungarian art historian based in Vienna. After earning her PhD from the Budapest University (ELTE), she worked at the Institute of Art History at the Hungarian Academy for ten years before leaving for Austria. She has taught at the University of Debrecen, the University of Vienna and University of Nottingham. In 2000 she was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and from 1991 until 2015 she was Permanent Visiting Professor at the Central European University in Budapest. Her special field is the art and architecture of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph. She has contributed studies on architecture, painting and the applied arts in Hungarian, German and English to numerous exhibition catalogues and studyvolumes. Her book on Gustav Klimt (1987) was published in English, German, French, Czech, Russian and Japanese, and Viennese Painting at the Turn of the Century (1991, 2nd ed. 2003) also appeared in Hungarian, English and German. Over the past few years she has published studies on the Hungarian painters Károly Ferenczy (2011) and István Csók (2013), and on Egon Schiele (2013). Most recently she edited and wrote the introductory study for a volume on the art critic of the Vienna Secession (Ludwig Hevesi und seine Zeit, Wien 2015).
KLÁRA TÓTH (Nyíregyháza, 1953) film critic, publicist, former film editor of Duna Television. She is the regular film columnist of the Hungarian journal Magyar Szemle and is a Member of the Hungarian Academy of the Arts. She is married to film director István Dárday. Her publications include Don Quijote köpenyében, 2005 (“In Don Quijote’s Cape”. The career of and documentaries about film critic László B. Nagy); A láthatatlan ország, 2011 (“The Invisible Country”. Hungarian Documentary Film and the Media 1992–2010).