MAGDA SZABÓ was born in 1917 in Debrecen, Hungary. She began her literary career as a poet. In the 1950s she disappeared from the publishing scene for political reasons and made her living by teaching and translating from French and English. She began writing novels, and in 1978 she was awarded the Kossuth Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Hungary. Her novel The Door was an international sensation, winning France’s Prix Femina Étranger and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and was made into a film starring Helen Mirren. Magda Szabó died in 2007.
GEORGE SZIRTES is a T. S. Eliot Prizewinning poet and has recently won the Best Translated Book Award in the USA.