László Öllös
Laureate of the 2021 edition
University lecturer (Doc. Mgr., PhD.), political scientist and journalist. He was born in 1957 in Dunajská Streda, where he attended primary school and grammar school. He completed his university studies at Comenius University in Bratislava. After graduating, he intended to become a manual worker so that the communist authorities could not put pressure on him. In the end, however, with the aim of studying various aspects of the life of Hungarians in Slovakia, he took a job at the Hungarian Workers’ Cultural Association in Czechoslovakia (Csemadok). Under the communist regime he became an active member of the civic opposition (the dissent), which established contacts with members of Charter 77 and with the Hungarian opposition. He is the author of several samizdat publications. During the 1989 revolution he co-authored a number of political documents. He was a co-founder of the Hungarian Independent Initiative (later the Hungarian Civic Party), which was established as early as 18 November 1989.
Laureate profile
University lecturer (Doc. Mgr., PhD.), political scientist and journalist. He was born in 1957 in Dunajská Streda, where he attended primary school and grammar school. He completed his university studies at Comenius University in Bratislava. After graduating, he intended to become a manual worker so that the communist authorities could not put pressure on him. In the end, however, with the aim of studying various aspects of the life of Hungarians in Slovakia, he took a job at the Hungarian Workers’ Cultural Association in Czechoslovakia (Csemadok). Under the communist regime he became an active member of the civic opposition (the dissent), which established contacts with members of Charter 77 and with the Hungarian opposition. He is the author of several samizdat publications. During the 1989 revolution he co-authored a number of political documents. He was a co-founder of the Hungarian Independent Initiative (later the Hungarian Civic Party), which was established as early as 18 November 1989.
After 1989 László Öllös embarked on an academic career: he studied at the Central European University in Budapest and completed supplementary studies at the New School for Social Research in New York. He completed his doctoral studies at Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem, Bölcsészettudományi Kar (Faculty of Humanities of Eötvös Loránd University) in Budapest and his habilitation as associate professor at Comenius University in Bratislava.
In 1996 he was involved in founding the Forum Institute, of which he is president, whose mission is the scholarly research of the national minorities living in Slovakia and the documentation of their history, culture, written records and other related heritage. L. Öllös focuses above all on the transformation of the political system of the Slovak Republic, the political life of Hungarians in Slovakia, Slovak–Hungarian relations, and the relationship between human rights and national rights.
He was a member of the Government Council of the Slovak Republic for National Minorities and a member of the Board of the Nation’s Memory Institute. He is president of the Forum Minority Research Institute, where he has taken part in a number of research projects. He chairs the editorial board of the social science journal Fórum Társadalomtudományi Szemle (Forum Social Science Review). He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Freedom and Reform Institute and a member of the Foreign Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
L. Öllös lectures at the Department of Political Science and Euro-Asian Studies of the Faculty of Arts of Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. He is the author of two monographs and dozens of professional and scholarly studies, reviews, commentaries and articles. Over the past two decades he has published a series of works both in Slovakia and abroad.