Edina Szvoren (HU)

Edina Szvoren, József Attila award-winning writer, was born in Budapest in 1974. Originally a music teacher and chorus master, she teaches music theory and solfège at the Béla Bartók Music High School in Budapest as an alumnus herself. She has been publishing regularly since 2005.

“Her talent, her message, her world, her knowledge and technique are already there, all of her short stories are recognisable,” said literary historian and editor Pál Réz, famous for his solid value judgment, in 2008. He described her as follows: “Her youth was not cloudless, but the adversities that fell early and abundantly seem to have turned her neither to selfishness nor indifference, but rather led her to the sympathy of the Russian prose writers of the 19th century. She is most susceptible to the humiliated and anguished (be it herself or others). Nevertheless, Szvoren goes beyond the sympathy of the great Russians: she brings human solidarity closer to readers, transforming it into something close to eroticism. It is very original and very beautiful.”

Her most recent books (volumes of novellas, several of them reissues): The Best Executioner in the Land; Sentences on Wonderment; There Is None, Nor Let There Be; On Intimate Terms; My Poems. A variety of her works have been published in English, Bulgarian, Dutch, Croatian, Macedonian, Italian, Serbian and Slovenian translations.

As the opening chord of the pulzArt8 literary programme, literary historian Judit Pieldner asks Edina Szvoren about her works, her distinct worldview, and her relationship to writing, which she formerly described as follows: “for me, creation is not self-perpetuation, not therapy, often not even a form of thinking, but the exercise of function that finds its purpose in the cause.”

Date: 13th October, Thursday 17:30

Location: Zamat Café