Our Authors

ANTAL BABUS (Gyöngyös, 1960) literary historian, librarian. Graduated from Debrecen University (KLTE) in 1984 majoring in Hungarian and Russian Philology. He obtained his PhD from the same university in 2002. He has been working in the Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books of the Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences since 1986 and has been acting as Head of Department since 2010. His main research area is Hungarian and Russian– Soviet literature of the 20th century.

TAMÁS BARCSAY (Budapest, 1939) historian, descendant of one of the oldest Transylvanian noble families. He was ten years old when his family emigrated to Austria and soon after to Canada. He pursued his degree in History from the University in Toronto and PhD from Oxford. He is Professor Emeritus at Ryerson University, Toronto, where he has taught from 1972.

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 was a member of the Hungarian Parliament between 1990–1998 (MDF) and 2012–2014 (FIDESZ). 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 2010–2011. 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.

SOMA HEGEDŐS (Dunaújváros, 1985) columnist and lawyer specialised in publiclaw. Heiscurrentlyaresearcher of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based think tank, and of the University of Public Service Ludovika, Budapest. He graduated from the Faculty of Law, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE, Budapest). As part of his post-graduate studies he became the Master of Laws (LL.M.) at the University of Cologne in state law with relation to European law and international law. He is writing his PhD dissertation on the political theology of Islam at the Faculty of Law, ELTE.

GYULA ILLYÉS (1902–1983) poet and novelist. Worked and studied in Paris between 1920–1926, and became connected with the Surrealist poets and artists. Back in Hungary, in the 1930s, 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 cause after the Second World War in vain. His secretly written poem from 1950, “One Sentence on Tyranny”, became the emblematic work of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, but 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.

DAVID MARTIN JONES is a political scientist, writer and commentator. Dr Jones is an Honorary Reader in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, and Visiting Professor and Teaching Fellow in War Studies at King’s College, University of London. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics, and has taught at the Open University, National University of Singapore, and the University of Tasmania. His works include Political Development in Pacific Asia (1997); The Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought (2001); with N. Khoo and M. L. R. Smith The Rise of China and Asia Pacific Security (Edward Elgar 2013); with M. L. R. Smith Sacred Violence. Political Religion in a Secular Age (Macmillan 2014); and The Political Impossibility of Modern Counter-Insurgency (Columbia 2015). His most recent publication, History’s Fools: The Pursuit of Idealism and the Revenge of Politics (C Hurst & Co. Publishers Ltd. 2020), examines the progressive ideas behind liberal Western practice since the end of the 20th century.

BORIS KÁLNOKY (Munich, 1961) grew up in Germany, the United States, Holland and France. His family left Hungary in 1947. He studied Politics and History in Hamburg and went on to work at the German daily Die Welt in 1987. In 1995, he became Balkans Correspondent for Die Welt, based in Budapest, and moved on in 2004 to become Middle East correspondent, based in Istanbul. He is the author of Ahnenland (Droemer Verlag, Munich, 2011), a book about what happened to his family and Hungary since 1952. He returned to Budapest in 2013, still for Die Welt. He also writes for a number of other media in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Since September 2020 he has been appointed Head of Media School at Mathias Corvinus Collegium, Budapest.

GYULA KODOLÁNYI (Budapest, 1942) Editor-in-Chief of Hungarian Review, is the author of 17 collections of poetry, scholarly and literary essays and poetry translations. He taught English and American Literature at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest (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, 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 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 the journal 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, and in 2020 the prestigious Kossuth Prize.

ÁGNES ZSÓFIA MAGYAR senior research fellow at the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based think tank. She has spent over five years at the European Parliament as an Accredited Parliamentary Assistant to the Hungarian EPP Delegation, and served as foreign policy adviser to the Hungarian Minister of Justice. She studied Institutional Communication at the Metropolitan University of Budapest, and also holds an MA from Eötvös Loránd University. She speaks English, French and German.

ZSOLT NÉMETH (Budapest, 1963) is a founding member of Fidesz (Hungarian Civic Party), and Member of Parliament since 1990. He studied political science at St Anthony’s College, Oxford University, as a visiting student in 1988–1989. He holds an MA in Economics and Sociology from Karl Marx (Corvinus) University of Economic Sciences, Budapest. Since 2014 he has been Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee and Head of the Hungarian Delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly to the Council of Europe. Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee between 2002 and 2010; Parliamentary State Secretary in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in 1998–2002 and again in 2010-2014. In 2004, he was Member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the European Parliament for a year. One of the main sponsors of the Act on National and Ethnic Minorities (1993), granting individual and collective rights and the right to self-government for ethnic and national minorities living in Hungary, as well as of the Act allowing non-resident Hungarians to apply for Hungarian citizenship if they are of Hungarian origin and speak the language (2010). He is also a founder of the Pro Minoritate Foundation; Honorary Chief Superintendent of the Calvinist Congregation of Transylvania; and Member of the Knight’s Order of the Johannites.

DÁNIEL OLÁH economist, head of “Macronome”, the economic column of the weekly Mandiner. He studied Applied Economics at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest and economic policy at Central European University, Budapest. He has been a research fellow at the John von Neumann University. Dániel is currently pursuing his PhD at the Doctoral School of Earth Sciences at the University of Pécs.

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; the latter updates Ambrose Bierce’s satirical take on disingenuous language. In 2019 he published Civilisation and Its Malcontents: Essays on Our Times (Hungarian Review, 2019).

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

ANNA WELLISZ is a communications strategist and a volunteer based in Washington, D.C. She taught literature, persuasive writing, and business communications at UC Berkeley, DeVry University, and the Keller Graduate School of Management. Her pieces appeared in Glaukopis, Annals Australasia, and The Wall Street Journal. She is also a contributor to SFPPR News & Analysis of the Online-Conservative-Journalism Center at the Washington-based Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research. As a management consultant at a London-based firm, Anna advised major Western companies on opportunities and optimal market entry strategy in East Central Europe at a time of rapid economic and political change, in a high-risk environment. As a communications strategist, she helped top diplomats, lawyers, and business executives devising and implementing communications strategies, preparing oral arguments, writing speeches, articles, and research papers to shape – and reshape – high stakes debates.