Our Authors

ATTILA BALÁZS (Novi Sad/Újvidék, 1955), 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 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 1994–2012 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.

CHARLES HEBBERT is an English editor and translator. Inspired by Hungarian films he first went to Hungary in 1982 to learn the language. He lived in Budapest for 10 years and visits every year to keep in touch with both the language and his friends. His favourite Hungarian writers are Antal Szerb, Jenő Rejtő and Dezső Kosztolányi. He has worked on guidebooks to Hungary for many years, which has given him the chance to travel the length of the country, from Lászlótanya to Velemér. He lives in London with his wife and two children – who, inspired by their visits to Budapest, are also learning Hungarian.

TODD HUIZINGA was a US diplomat from 1992–2012. Currently Mr. Huizinga is the president of the Center for Transatlantic Renewal. He is also the senior fellow for Europe of the Religious Freedom Institute. He is the author of The New Totalitarian Temptation: Global Governance and the Crisis of Democracy in Europe (New York: Encounter Books, 2016).

GYULA KODOLÁNYI (Budapest, 1942) Editor-in-chief of Hungarian Review, is the author of sixteen 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 the Prime Minister. In 1992–1996 he was the Vice President of the Hungária Televízió Foundation, which created the Duna Television, a cultural satellite channel. 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. He is a member of the Hungarian Academy of the Arts. In 2016 he received the Janus Pannonius Prize for poetry translation. He received the prestigious Kossuth Prize in 2020.

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.

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 18 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 more recent books are Worth the Detour: A History of the Guidebook from Pausanias to the Rough Guide; Vienna: A Cultural and Literary History and A New Devil’s Dictionary, which updates Ambrose Bierce’s satirical take on disingenuous language. In 2019 he published Civilisation and Its Malcontents: Essays on Our Times (Hungarian Review, 2019).

ISTVÁN PÓCZA is an expert on international affairs. He is the Director of Research for Danube Institute. He earned his BSc. and MSc. degrees in European Studies from the Institute of Political and International Studies at ELTE University. In 2015–2016 he worked at the Migration Research Institute. Parallel, he worked at Századvég Foundation first as a Research Fellow, then as a Senior Research Fellow until 2018. In 2018–2020 he has worked as Senior Research Analyst at the Budapest-based Center for Fundamental Rights as an expert on foreign relations focusing primarily on European politics, especially Austria and Germany.

DAVID A. J. REYNOLDS is a writer, teacher, and editor from England, who has lived and taught in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the US. He is the author of Revising History in Communist Europe: Constructing Counter-Revolution in 1956 and 1968 (Anthem Press, January 2020).

GEORGE SCHÖPFLIN (Budapest, 1939) graduated MA, LLB. from the University of Glasgow and pursued postgraduate studies at the College of Europe in Bruges, awarded PhD (Tallinn). He worked at the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the BBC before taking up university lecturing, at the London School of Economics and 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 (EPP) (Christian Democrats) in 2004, re-elected in 2009 and in 2014. He served on Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee, including as EPP coordinator.

ISTVÁN STUMPF (Sárospatak, 1957) is a Professor of Constitutional Law and Governance at Széchenyi István University (Győr) and ELTE Law School. He graduated from Eötvös Loránd University receiving his degree in law and sociology, and a PhD in political science. He was a founder and Director of ELTE István Bibó Law College (1982–1998) and founder and President of Századvég Foundation (1991–2010). He also served as Minister of the Prime Minister’s Office between 1998 and 2002 in the first cabinet of Viktor Orbán. He was a member of the Constitutional Court of Hungary from July 2010 to July of 2019. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Social Science, Institute of Political Science, of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

GÁBOR TURI (Nyíregyháza, 1951), journalist, diplomat and politician. He completed his degree in English and history at Lajos Kossuth University in 1975 and his degree in journalism at the School for Journalism in 1977. He began his professional career as a journalist and editor in Debrecen. He took diplomatic assignments as cultural attaché in London (1992–1995) and press attaché in Washington, DC (1998–2002). He served as Deputy Mayor of his former home city, Debrecen (2002–2006). He retired in 2013 as director of external relations of the University of Debrecen (UD). A collection of his essays and articles, Perspectives, was published in 2011 by UD Press. He has also published three books on jazz: I Say: Jazz (Editio Musica, 1983), Time for Jazz (Osiris, 1999) and American Jazz Diary (Gramofon, 2019). He was awarded the András Pernye Prize by the Hungarian Jazz Federation for his lifetime achievements. He played an active role in the opposition movements in Debrecen from 1988 and was one of the organisers of the Pan-European Picnic in 1989.

E. SYLVESTER VIZI is the former President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) and team leading researcher at its Institute of Experimental Medicine. Professor Vizi is an internationallyrenowned authority on neuroscience and one of the most widely quoted Hungarian scientists in the world. He has been an honorary doctor of several foreign universities and academies, a member of various scientific societies, Professor Emeritus of Semmelweis Medical University, President of the Society for Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge, President of the Hungarian Atlantic Council, and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Friends of Hungary Foundation. His wide-ranging activities span scientific research, science education, the dissemination of scientific knowledge, as well as various tasks related to the improvement of Hungary’s involvement in the international arena and the furthering of the country’s reputation.