17-19 Cockspur St, London SW1Y 5BL
Hungarian literary historian and 1956 revolutionary György Gömöri has published his latest book, entitled ‘My Multilingual Life - An autobiography up to 1990’ with Savaria University Press in 2024. For the London launch of the book, director of the Liszt Institute London, Botond Zákonyi, will be in conversation with its author, György Gömöri.
Please note that this event will be held in Hungarian.
About the book:
"Most people are born once, I was born three times - or reborn, to be exact. First, physically, on 3rd April, 1934, and then twice more, spiritually: in January 1945 and October 1956.
We set off in an open lorry on 17th November 1956 on the pretext of picking up food near the western border. One of the students, who spoke Russian well, managed to obtain proof of this from the Russian town command. These came in handy because when we reached Győr the lorry was stopped by a Hungarian officer, but when he saw that the papers were written in Russian he waved us on. We were lucky he didn't search us, because in the lining of my jacket was my revolutionary student identity card, which my mother had sewn in it the night before. A little later, a few kilometres from the Austrian border, the truck dropped us off. We did this last stretch on foot, all the way to the bridge at Andau into Austria, intending to return the same way a few days later. In my case, a few days turned into twelve years."
About the author:
György Gömöri (b. 1934, Budapest) is a Hungarian-English literary historian, poet, translator and university professor.
György Gömöri studied Hungarian and Polish at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. In 1956 he became a member of the Petőfi Circle. In October-November 1956 he was an editor of Egyetemi Ifjúság. He emigrated to the UK after the 1956 Revolution and later studied at Oxford University. Between 1963-1965 he was a professor of Polish and Hungarian at the University of California, Berkeley, then worked as a researcher at Harvard University. Between 1965 - 1969 he taught Polish and Hungarian literature at the Institute for East European Studies at the University of Birmingham, England, and from 1969 to 2001 at Cambridge University. He has been a member of the editorial board of the journal World Literature Today since 1969, a Fellow of Darwin College Cambridge since 1970 and an emeritus Fellow since 2001. A member of the editorial board of the Viennese journal Bécsi Napló since 1994, he has been chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Rotary Prize for Literature since 2008.
He co-edited collections of poems by László Nagy, Attila József, Miklós Radnóti and György Petri, and an anthology of modern Hungarian poets in English with George Szirtes. He has translated into Hungarian poems by Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz and Clive Wilmer, among others.