ZSOLT CZAKÓ Graphic design, photography and typography play an equally important role in the oeuvre of Zsolt Czakó. He has always been crossing the boundaries between art and design and has a deep interest in creating abstract visual languages. Experimental attitude, a deep focus on the subject matter and a complex way of thinking characterise his work. Besides his design projects (books, communication materials, identities and exhibition design) he attracted interest with his title sequences, short films and animated scene projections.
GYULA ILLYÉS (1902–1983), one of Hungary’s internationally best known poets and writers, worked and studied in Paris between 1920 and 1926, and became connected with the Surrealist poets and artists. Back in Hungary, in the Thirties, he was invited to work on the literary magazine Nyugat (The West) by the Editor-in-Chief, the famous poet and writer, Mihály Babits. Anti-Nazi, a leader of the National Peasant Party, the Communists tried to win Illyés for their causes after World War II, with no success. His secretly written poem from 1950, One Sentence on Tyranny, became the emblematic work of the October 1956 Revolution, banned in Hungary until the late 1980s. Returning to publication in 1961, Illyés lived to a productive and successful old age, renewing his poetry, writing dramas, translations and essays.
GÉZA JESZENSZKY (Budapest, 1941), D. Phil., historian, graduated from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. From 1976 to 2011, he taught at what is today Corvinus University of Budapest. Was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at U.C. Santa Barbara in 1984-86. Taught the history of international relations and of Central Europe at numerous other universities in the U.S. and Europe. He was Foreign Minister of Hungary in the first non-Communist government (1990–94), Ambassador to the United States of America in 1998–2002, and in 2011-2014 to Norway and Iceland. He is the author of numerous publications on history and foreign policy, his latest book in English is Post-Communist Europe and Its National/ Ethnic Problems (Budapest, 2009). His account of Hungary’s relations to her neighbours (in Hungarian) came out this April. He is an editorial adviser for Hungarian Review.
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. In 2015, he was Prima Primissima Prize winner in literature. In 2016, he received the Hungarian PEN Club’s Janus Pannonius Prize for Poetry Translation.
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.
DAVID PRYCE-JONES was born in Vienna in 1936. Having read history at Oxford University, he became literary editor of the Spectator, and then a roving correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. In that capacity he had had assignments in central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He also covered the 1967 and 1973 wars in the Middle East and afterwards travelled widely in Arab countries. The author of ten novels, he taught creative writing for a year at the University of Iowa, and afterwards at California State College at Hayward and at the University of California at Berkeley. Among his non-fiction books are The Hungarian Revolution (1970), Unity Mitford (1972), The Closed Circle (1989) and The War That Never Was (1995). Since 1999 he has been a Senior Editor at National Review.
DAVID A. J. REYNOLDS is a freelance writer and editor from England, specializing in history and current affairs. He has lived and taught in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Philadelphia, and presently resides in Illinois.
DALMA SZENTPÁLY (Budapest, 1989) is a PhD student at Eötvös Loránd University. As a Kellner Scholar she attended Bard College, NY, in 2013/14. While graduating from her Master Studies, she won the American Studies Department’s “Outstanding Thesis Award,” in 2015. Her doctoral research focuses on gender roles in contemporary adaptations of Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales in young adult literature and youth culture. Next to her studies, she works as an international coordinator at Saint Ignatius Jesuit College of Advanced Studies, Budapest.
PETER UNWIN (Middlesbrough, 1932) is a writer and retired diplomat. He was Ambassador to Hungary from 1983 to 1986 and Ambassador to Denmark from 1986 to 1988. He served as Deputy Secretary General of the Commonwealth from 1989 to 1993. Having retired from the Diplomatic Service, he has been writing books on history, and is an occasional contributor to The Times. Among his books are Voice in the Wilderness: Imre Nagy and the Hungarian Revolution (1991), Where East Met West: a Central European Journey (2000), 1956: Power Defied (2006), Newcomers’ Lives: the Story of Immigrants as Told in Obituaries from The Times (2013).