György Konrád
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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.
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[edit] Life
Konrad was born in 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 Loránd Eötvös 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 P.E.N., and in 1997 he became 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 2001 he received the Charlemagne Award of the city of Aachen.
[edit] Partial list of works
[edit] Fiction
- The Case Worker
- The City Builder
- The Loser
- A Feast in the Garden
- The Stone Dial
[edit] 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
