Gergely Ágnes

Ágnes Gergely, née Guttmann, was born to a Jewish family in the village of Endrőd, Hungary. Her parents were Rózsika Fenákel and György Guttmann. Her father was murdered in the Holocaust during World War II. She spent her childhood in Zalaegerszeg and was educated in Budapest and Szeged. In 1950, she got a job in a factory, but was later admitted to the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Budapest. She taught high school, worked as a producer for Magyar Rádió's foreign broadcasts, then was a columnist and editor for newspapers and the literary magazine Nagyvilág. She also translated English and American works into Hungarian, including works by James Joyce and Dylan Thomas, and lectured on English literature at Eötvös Loránd University. She took her pen name Gergely from the hero of the Hungarian novel Eclipse of the Crescent Moon by Géza Gárdonyi. In 1963, Ágnes published her first poetry collection, Ajtófélfámon jel vagy (Sign on My Door Jamb). Her debut novel A tolmács (The Interpreter) appeared in 1973. Her collected poems were published in 2006 in the volume Útérintő. Ágnes Gergely was awarded the Attila József Prize in 1977 and 1987 and the Kossuth Prize in 2000. She is a member of the Society of Poets and the Hungarian branch of the PEN Club. In 1998, she was elected a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.