György Konrád

The native form of this personal name is Konrád György. This article uses the Western name order.

György (George) Konrád

György (George) Konrád (born April 2, 1933) is a Hungarian novelist and essayist, known as an advocate of individual freedom. He was a dissident under the communist regime.

Life

Konrad was born in Berettyóújfalu, near Debrecen into an affluent Jewish family. He graduated in 1951 from the Madách Secondary School in Budapest, entered the Lenin Institute and eventually studied literature, sociology and psychology at the Eötvös Loránd University. In 1956 he participated in the Hungarian Uprising against the Soviet occupation, but did not kill anybody, although he had a gun.

First working at the Budapest Institute of Urban Planning and later the Academy's Institute for Literary Scholarship, he had a collision with the political system and lost his position, was jailed for some time, as well as being under a publication ban during most of the 1970s and early 1980s.

From 1982 to 1984 he lived in Berlin on a stipend. In 1990 he was elected president of International PEN serving until 1993, and in 1997 he was the first non-German to become president of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

He has published a number of essays on politics, literature and sociology, as well as fiction. One of Konrád's most significant novels is The Case Worker, a bleak portrait of human suffering in modern urban industrial society, written from the perspective of a social services functionary. A Feast in the Garden and The Stone Dial are the first two parts of a semi autobiographical fictional trilogy.

In 1985 he received the Prix européen de l'essai Charles Veillon for Antipolitik. Mitteleuropäische Meditationen.

In 2001 he received the Charlemagne Award of the city of Aachen.

In 2003 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Novi Sad.

In 2007 Konrád won the National Jewish Book Award in the Biography, Autobiography & Memoir category, for A Guest in my Own Country: A Hungarian Life.

He was a founder of the Hungarian liberal party the SZDSZ but left the party in 2009. He was a friend to the Polish intellectualist - writer Stanisław Lem and politician Władysław Bartoszewski.

Partial list of works

Fiction

• The Case Worker
• The City Builder
• The Loser
• A Feast in the Garden
• The Stone Dial

Non fiction

• The Intellectual on the Road to Class Power (1978), with Iván Szelényi
• Antipolitics
• The Melancholy of Rebirth (1995)
• The Invisible Voice: Meditations on Jewish Themes
• A Guest in My Own Country: A Hungarian Life (2003)

Articles

• “The Intelligentsia and Social Structure”. Telos 38 (Winter 1978-79). New York: Telos Press.

External links

• Homepage
• "Chance Wanderings," an essay by Konrad on the 'revolutions' of 1989
• A biographical essay, written in English