ISTVÁN FODOR is an electrical engineer and was awarded the Széchenyi Prize by the State of Hungary. He established the Ericsson Company’s Hungarian subsidiary in 1991, and was its CEO until 2002, and then Chairman of the Board until 2008. Between 1998 and 2000, he was the Chairman of the Hungarian Section of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE). Between 2004 and 2007, he was a member of the European Research Advisory Board. He is a member of the Semmelweis University Economic Council and a former member of the Eötvös Lóránd University Economic Council. From 2010 to October 2012 he served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Urban Management Centre of Budapest. István Fodor was awarded the Manager of the Year Prize in 1998, and Middle Cross of the Order of Merit of Hungary.
NORBERT HAKLIK (Ózd, 1976), writer and critic, studied Hungarian and English literature and linguistics in Budapest. He is the author of two short story compilations (A Mennybemeneteli Iroda [Salvation Agency], 1998, 2013; Világvége Gömörlúcon [The World’s End in Gömörlúc], 2001), a novel (Big Székely Só [Big Szekler Show], 2006), and several translations from English into Hungarian. His latest work Egy Duna-regény anatómiája [The Anatomy of a Danube-novel], 2013, is a set of literary essays that entirely focuses on Thomas Kabdebo’s novel trilogy Danubius Danubia, just like the work published in the present issue of Hungarian Review. Haklik currently lives in Brno (the Czech Republic), with his wife and daughter, and – besides his nine-to-five job as a manager for a global IT company – is working on a new short story collection.
ANIKÓ KATONA is an art historian of the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest. Her research focus is the history of Hungarian graphic design and visual culture, with a special interest on the political and social aspects. She was a curator of the poster collection of the Hungarian National Library from 2009–2015. In 2014 she was assistant curator of the “Modern Hungarian Poster 1924–1942” exhibition at the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest. In 2015, she was one of the curators of the National Library’s First World War exhibition entitled “Propaganda in First World War.” Since 2014, she has published a book and several articles on the poster art of the First World War. Since 2017, she has been teaching art history at the Metropolitan University Budapest.
GYULA KODOLÁNYI (Budapest, 1942), Editor-in-Chief of Hungarian Review, 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.
GORDON McKECHNIE (Detroit, 1951) was educated at the International School of Geneva and at the University of Oxford. After a career in banking (working in the then emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe from 1989), he became a Partner of Deloitte and subsequently worked for the UK Treasury. Among his current positions, he is Chairman of the OECD’s Infrastructure and PPP Network and member of the International Committee of Tearfund.
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 Vaclav 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, art historian Ilona Sármany, 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; Vienna: A Cultural History Signet (Oxford University Press; Italian edition: Vienna: Ritratto di unacitta, Odoya, Bologna), and A New Devil’s Dictionary: Lexicon for Contrarians.
GÉZA PÁSKÁNDI (1933–1997) was born in the Hungarian village of Szatmárhegy in Transylvania. He received his degree in law from Kolozsvár and began to work for papers published in Hungarian in Romania. As so many of his peers sympathising with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Géza Páskándi was imprisoned in 1957. He was sentenced to six years of forced labour imprisonment from which he was released in 1963 and could move to Hungary in 1974. Similar to many other writers who changed their homeland, but not their language, moving to Hungary brought a new blossoming out in Páskándi’s career. His intellectual and avant-garde poetry: Tű foka (Eye of the Needle, 1972), his evoking figures of Transylvanian cultural history: Vendégség (Feast), Tornyot választok (Selecting a Tower), Szekértől elfutott lovak (Horses Running Away from the Wagon), as well as his grotesque and biting one-act plays, comedies and “verse-garlands” all exhibit originality and playfulness in language. He is the winner the Attila József Prize in 1977, Kortárs Prize in 1992, Kossuth Prize in 1993, and Ernő Szép Prize (after his death) in 1996.
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.
DAVID A. J. REYNOLDS is a freelance writer and editor from England, specialising in history and current affairs. He has lived and taught in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Philadelphia, and presently resides in Illinois.
GYÖRGY SCHÖPFLIN (Budapest, 1939) graduated M.A., LL.B. from the University of Glasgow and pursued postgraduate studies at the College of Europe in Bruges. He worked at the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the BBC before taking up university lecturing, at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London (1976–2004), including latterly as Jean Monnet Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre for the Study of Nationalism. Professor Schöpflin was elected a Member of the European Parliament for Fidesz–Hungarian Civic Union, a member of the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) in 2004, re-elected in 2009 and in 2014.
ROBERT SERVICE is a British historian, academic and author who has written extensively on the history of the Soviet Union, particularly the era from the October Revolution to Stalin’s death. He was until 2013 a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is best known for his biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. His latest books include The End of the Cold War: 1985–1991 (2015), The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution (2017), and Russia and Its Islamic World (2017).
KRZYSZTOF SZCZERSKI (Kraków, 1973) is Chief of Cabinet to the President of the Republic of Poland. He has an MA in Political and Social Science and a PhD from the Institute of Political Science and International Relations at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Between 2007 and 2008 he was Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and became a Member of Parliament from the Law and Justice Party in 2011. He has been an associate professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków since 2013, and since 2015, a State Secretary in the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland.