Sándor Kányádi

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Sándor Kányádi

Sándor Kányádi (b. 1929) is a Romanian poet and translator of Hungarian ancestry, one of the most famous contemporary Hungarian-language poets today.

[edit] Biography

Born in a small village in Transylvania to a family of farmers, he moved to Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár) in 1950. Nowadays, he spends his time in both Budapest and his countryside cottage in the Transylvanian countryside.

Kányádi graduated from Bólyai University with a degree in philosophy and became a teacher of Hungarian language and literature. He published his first volume of poetry in 1955 while an assistant editor and frequent contributor for several literary magazines, including poems to children's magazines that are still very popular today. His translations are also very popular and include Saxon and Yiddish folk poetry, contemporary Romanian poetry, and major German and French poets. He also gave several literary talks abroad during the 1960s and 1970s to Hungarian communities in Western Europe, Scandinavia, North America, and South America.

He has been active in political issues throughout the years, as shown in his numerous works relating to the oppression of the Transylvanian Hungarian minority throughout the years. In 1987 the Romanian Communist government refused him a passport to visit an international poets' conference in Rotterdam, which resulted in his resignation from the Romanian Writers' Union out of protest.

[edit] Awards

He is the recipient of many awards, such as the Poetry Prize of the Romanian Writers' Union and the Kossuth Prize, the Herder Prize in Vienna in 1995, and the Central European Time Millennium Prize.