LÁSZLÓ CSABA (1954), economist, professor of international political economy at Central European University and Corvinus University in Budapest. He is a Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Author and editor of nine books, he published over 300 scholarly articles in countries all over the world. In 1999–2000 he was President of the European Association for Comparative Economic Studies. His latest book is Európai közgazdaságtan (Economics in Europe), Budapest: Akadémiai / W. Kluwer, 2014.

GYÖRGY CSÓTI received his degree in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Budapest in 1971. He was a founding member of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) in 1988 and became a member of the Hungarian Parliament in 1990. In 1999–2003 he was Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Hungary to the Republic of Croatia and Foreign Policy Advisor to President Pál Schmitt between 2010 and 2011. Currently he is the Director of the Institute for the Protection of Minority Rights. He received the Big Cross of the Big German Order with the ribbon in 1994 and the Prince Branimir Order with the ribbon (Croatia) in 2003.

DAVID L. DUSENBURY (1979) is a visiting lecturer at Loyola University, Maryland, and the author, most recently, of Platonic Legislations: An Essay on Legal Critique in Ancient Greece (2017). He is a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and is currently writing a book entitled The Innocence of Pontius Pilate (2019).

GÉZA ANTAL ENTZ (Kolozsvár/Cluj, Romania, 1949). Hungarian art historian and politician, he is a specialist of architectural history, and has been coordinating and working on the complete topographic catalogue of historical monuments in Hungary. He is also an expert on the historical culture of Hungarians in Transylvania (Romania) and the Uplands (Slovakia). In 1990–94 he was State Secretary for the Affairs of Hungarians beyond the Borders. In 1998–2002 he became Head of the Office for the Protection of National Heritage, and later Deputy State Secretary of Culture.

BOTOND GAÁL is a former Professor of Christian Dogmatics at the Debrecen Reformed Theological University. He was trained in mathematics, physics and theology. He holds a PhD in systematic theology; made research into the origins of the Reformation and is a Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Professor Gaál is known as a specialist on James Clerk Maxwell’s and Michael Polanyi’s significance for the European Christian civilisation. He has published several books and articles on the relationship between science and theology.

GEORGE GÖMÖRI (Budapest, 1934) has been living in England since November 1956. After studies in Oxford, he taught at the University of California (Berkeley), then researched at Harvard. From 1969 to 2001 he taught at the University of Cambridge. He published many books on Polish and Hungarian literature; also numerous books of poetry in Hungarian and several in English. He is a member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (Cracow). His recent publication, The Alien in the Chapel. Poems and Letters by Ferenc Békássy (Skyscraper Books), was edited with his wife, Mari Gömöri.

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.

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.

GYULA KODOLÁNYI (Budapest, 1942), Editor-in-Chief of Hungarian Review is the author of thirteen 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. In 2003 with Magyar Szemle journal, he received a Prima Prize. In 2015, he was Prima Primissima Prize winner in literature.

RYSZARD ANTONI LEGUTKO (Krakow, 1949) is a Polish philosopher and politician. Under communism he was one of the editors of the samizdat quarterly Arka. After the collapse of the communist regime he co- founded the Centre for Political Thought, which combines research, teaching, seminars and conferences and is also a publishing house. He has translated and written commentaries to Plato’s Phaedo (1995), Euthyphro (1998) and Apology (2003). He is the author of several books: Plato’s Critique of Democracy (1990), Toleration (1997), A Treatise on Liberty (2007), An Essay on the Polish Soul (2008) and Socrates (2013). In 2007 he was Poland’s Education Minister, and in 2007–2009 Secretary of State in the Chancellery of President Lech Kaczyński. He is currently a Member of the European Parliament, where he sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Deputy Chairman of the Conservatives and Reformists parliamentary group.

TAMÁS MAGYARICS (Budapest, 1953), historian, former Ambassador. He has been on the faculty of the School of English and American Studies, ELTE, Budapest since 1987. He also taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) (1991), the International European Studies (IES) in Vienna (2000–2011 and 2017- ), and Corvinus University of Budapest (1999–2009). He has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade (2000–2011) and was its Director (2010–2011). He was the editor-in-chief of Külügyi Szemle and Foreign Policy Review (2000–2010). He was Ambassador to Ireland from 2011-2015. Currently he is a Professor at the American Studies Department at Eötvös Loránd University, and a Senior Research Fellow at the American Studies Research Center at the University of Public Service. His main publications include Nagy- Britannia politikája Közép-Európában 1918 óta [Great Britain’s Foreign Policy in Central Europe since 1918] Pro Minoritate Summer and Autumn 2002; Az Egyesült Államok története a 20. században [The History of the United States in the 20th Century], 2008; Az Egyesült Államok külpolitikájának története. Mítosz és valóság: Értékek és érdekek [The History of US Foreign Policy. Myth and Reality: Values and Interests], 2nd ed. 2014, and Amerikai konzervatív gondolkodók [American Conservative Thinkers] (selected and edited), 2017.

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.

ORSOLYA PACSAY-TOMASSICH is an economist and a diplomat. Currently she is the Minister of State for International Affairs at the Ministry for Human Capacities. She received her degree in economics in 1997 and a PhD in military science in 2007 from the National University of Public Service. Dr Pacsay-Tomassich worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in various positions until 2003 including head of the cabinet of Deputy State Secretary responsible for multilateral policies and head of the Visegrád Cooperation Desk. Between 2013-2016 she was the Foreign Policy Director at Századvég Foundation and Foreign Relations Director at the Századvég Economic Research Institute. Since 2016 she has been a member of the editorial board of Hungarian 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.

PAUL SOHÁR made his way to the US as a teenage refugee from Hungary. After receiving a BA in philosophy he took a job in a research lab while writing in every genre, publishing seven volumes of translations, including Silver Pirouettes (Faludy translations, TheWriteDeal 2012) and In Contemporary Tense (Iniquity Press, 2013). His own poetry: Homing Poems (Iniquity, 2005) and The Wayward Orchard, a Wordrunner Prize winner (2011). Other awards: first prize in the 2012 Lincoln Poets Society Contest, second prize in RI Writers Circle 2014 Contest. Prose work: True Tales of a Fictitious Spy (Synergebooks, 2006). He lectures at MLA and RMMLA conferences and at Centenary College, NJ.

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.