Lajos Grendel

Lajos Grendel was born on 6 April 1948 in Levice. A writer, essayist, journalist and university lecturer, he is one of the best-known and most important representatives of Hungarian literature in Slovakia. He studied Hungarian and English at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava. Since his debut in 1979 he has published 29 books. His works available in Slovak include Einsteinove zvony (Einstein’s Bells), Cudná správa z vrcholu sna (A Chaste Report from the Summit of a Dream; a selection) and two volumes of the New Hont Trilogy (a paraphrase of the historical name of Hont County, his native region), all translated by Karol Wlachovský. Several of his books have been translated into German, Italian, French and Russian.

He has received numerous awards in Slovakia and abroad. The most important include state honours in Slovakia and Hungary, as well as the Slovak Writers’ Society Prize, the Crystal Wing Award, the Attila József Prize and the Kossuth Prize.

He worked at the Madách publishing house and from 1990 to 1992 served as editor-in-chief of the literary monthly Irodalmi Szemle. Until September 1997 he was editor-in-chief of the literary journal Kalligram. Together with other dissidents from the Hungarian minority, he was one of the founders of the Hungarian Independent Initiative (MNI), established on 18 November 1989 in Šaľa, which was the very first political movement to stand against the communist regime during the Velvet Revolution. The Initiative represented part of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia and worked closely with the Public Against Violence (VPN) movement both during the revolutionary changes and in the run-up to the elections. After the Velvet Revolution he had several opportunities and offers, but he did not join the ranks of politicians; he remained faithful to his readers and, of course, to writing.

Throughout his life, Lajos Grendel has doggedly and unsparingly dissected the moral and existential dimensions of historical consciousness and its transformations, as well as of national and minority identity. His judgements on the forms of oppression and persecution and on the methods by which the machinery of dictatorship destroys a human being are surgically precise. His novels, essays and short stories, as literary forms, have distinctive and often unique features that stem precisely from his profound understanding of the fundamental and fateful questions of the minority existence of Hungarians in Slovakia. Through his work and by the means of literature, he has drawn, both for the world and for ourselves, a picture that we should all know well, so that we can guard against the temptations and threats that all the nations and nationalities of Central Europe experienced in the not-so-distant past.

The President of the Trnava Self-Governing Region confers the Anton Srholec Freedom Award on Lajos Grendel for his lifelong intellectual and civic mission in the service of freedom. Through his literary work and civic engagement, he has made a significant contribution to building a tolerant, open society, with an emphasis on the position of the contemporary individual and on the coexistence and mutual enrichment of Hungarian and Slovak culture in Slovakia.