ATTILA BALÁZS (1955, Novi Sad/Újvidék), writer, translator, journalist. Author of twelve books of prose. Founder of the cultural magazine Ex Symposion. He worked as editor for the YU Radio-Television, moved to Budapest in late 1991. For a time he worked as war correspondent, then as political correspondent for the newspaper Pesti Hírlap. His works have been published at home and abroad. Between 1994 and 2012 he was editor of the cultural programmes of the Hungarian Radio. Among many distinctions, he has received the Attila József Prize for Literature and the Book of the Year Prize 1999.

MIKLÓS BÁNFFY (30 December 1873–6 June 1950) was a Hungarian nobleman, politician, and novelist. His books include The Transylvanian Trilogy (They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting, and They Were Divided). Beginning his political career at the time when Hungary was a constituent of Austria–Hungary, Bánffy was elected a Member of Parliament in 1901 and became Director of the Hungarian State Theatres (1913–1918). Both a traditionalist and a member of the avantgarde, he wrote five plays, two books of short stories, and a distinguished novel. Overcoming fierce opposition, his intervention made it possible for Béla Bartók’s works to have their first performance in Budapest. Bánffy became Foreign Minister of Hungary in István Bethlen’s government of 1921. His trilogy, A Transylvanian Tale, also called The Writing on the Wall, was published between 1934 and 1940. Bánffy portrayed pre-war Hungary as a nation in decline, failed by a short-sighted aristocracy. The Communist regime in Hungary permitted the reissue of A Transylvanian Tale in 1982, and it was translated into English for the first time in 1999.

KATINKA BERETKA was born in Bačka Topola, Serbia in 1985. She is an associate professor at the Faculty for Legal and Business Studies “dr Lazar Vrkatic”, Novi Sad, and associate professor at the Faculty of Law for Business and Jurisdiction in Subotica. Dr Beretka is a guest lecturer at the University of Szeged, Faculty of Law and Political Sciences. Her main field of research is the autonomy of the minorities in Serbia.

TONY BRINKLEY (Pittsburgh, 1948) is a Professor of English at the University of Maine. He has translated extensively modern Russian, German, and French poetry. His poetry and translations have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, The New Review of Literature, Cerise Press, Drunken Boat, Shofar, May Day, World Literature Today, Otoliths, and Poetry Salzburg Review. He is the author of Stalin’s Eyes (Puckerbrush Press) and the co-editor with Keith Hanley of Romantic Revisions (Cambridge University Press). His translations of Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Gyula Kodolányi have appeared in previous issues of Hungarian Review.

ANTHONY DANIELS (London, 1949) is a writer and retired psychiatrist who lived several years in Africa. Daniels has written extensively on culture, art, politics, education, and medicine – often drawing on his experiences as a doctor and psychiatrist in Africa and the United Kingdom. He is the author of several books, notably Life at the Bottom and Romancing Opiates. Dr Daniels writes under the name of Theodore Dalrymple.

GÉZA ANTAL ENTZ (Kolozsvár/Cluj, 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 1990–1994 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 a Deputy State Secretary of Culture.

OLGA GRANASZTÓI completed her degree in Hungarian and French at Eötvös Loránd University in 1997. In 2006 she completed her doctorate at Szeged University on 18th century French and Hungarian literature and cultural history. Her dissertation, „Francia könyvek magyar olvasói – a tiltott irodalom fogadtatása Magyarországon” [The Hungarian Readers of French Books – The Reception of Forbidden Literature in Hungary], was published in 2009. She is presently working as a member of the Classic Hungarian Textology Research Group at Debrecen University on the manuscripts of Ferenc Kazinczy.

LÁSZLÓ KÁLNOKY (Eger, 1912–Budapest, 1985) was a Hungarian poet and literary translator. He belonged to the third generation of Nyugat, a significant Hungarian language periodical published between 1908 and 1941. His first book of poetry appeared in 1939 entitled Árnyak kertje [The Garden of Shadows] and was followed by eleven more collections. He was also known for his literary translations, which were published from 1943. He is mostly noted for the translation of the second part of Goethe’s tragedy, Faust. He received numerous literary prizes, such as the József Attila Prize, the Füst Milán and the Déry Tibor Prizes.

GYULA KODOLÁNYI (Budapest, 1942), Editor-in-Chief of Hungarian Review, is the author of fourteen 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 (1984–1985) 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 1990–1994, he served as Senior Foreign Policy Adviser to Prime Minister József Antall. In 2000–2005 he was an Adviser 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.

SIR NOEL MALCOLM is a British Historian whose research interests include the history of Western knowledge of and ideas about Islam and the Ottoman Empire from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. He read History and English Literature at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and was a research student at Trinity College, Cambridge, writing a doctoral thesis on Thomas Hobbes. He began his career as a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge; he was then political columnist and, subsequently, Foreign Editor of The Spectator, then chief political columnist of The Daily Telegraph. Since 2002 he has been a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He has published books on, among other subjects, early modern philosophy (with an emphasis on Hobbes) and the history and culture of the Balkans.

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, the art historian Ilona Sármány, 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 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, and Vienna: A Cultural and Literary History (Signal Books/Oxford University Press). His latest work is A New Devil’s Dictionary: Lexicon for Contrarians, a reformulation for our times of Ambrose Bierce’s satirical take on disingenuous language.

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.

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 also published in Hungarian 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.

ÉVA ESZTER SZABÓ, PhD, Historian and Americanist, is assistant professor at the Department of American Studies, School of English and American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Member of LASA, SHAFR, HAAS and HUSSE. Her fields of research include the history of inter-American relations, the correlation between US foreign and immigration policies, global migration in global politics and border studies. Her most significant work is entitled US Foreign and Immigration Policies in the Caribbean Basin (2007).