“I was born in Szentes, 9 March 1973; 40 years to the day after Yuri Gagarin came into the world. My mother told me that when I was a kid I wanted to be a heroic, Soviet soldier, though they failed to feed me up on vodka-soaked bread. I don’t know exactly where I went wrong in my life, but the facts speak for themselves: I grew up to be a coward, Hungarian, and unfit for the army. I finished my high school studies at the Szamárdelelő Csárda, and after playing with the 2+1 wedding band, my parents sent me off to get a Budapest university education – so I could spend the next five years sneering at dustmen in the Egri Tanszék bar at Zsigmond Móricz square. It was in that pub that I came to the realisation that writers can get away with sleeping quite a lot, and in that divine moment I chose to go down this rocky path.”
That excerpt from the Attila József, Miklós Mészöly and Fakanál Arany-prize winning writer gives us an idea of what we can expect from this evening with András Cserna-Szabó. The early-stage Half Three (1998), Fear and Trembling in Nagyhályog (2003), the stomach-obsessed short stories and gastronomy-essays of Levin’s Road (2004), and Woe to the Vanquished, or Baking and Cooking when Hungover (The Novel of the Cat’s Miaow with 52 Recipes, 2007), written with Benedek Darida, the Great Book of the Cat’s Miaow (2012), A Death Star Built on the Site of Your Heart (2015) and the most recently published story of an outlaw of the Great Hungarian Plains, Sömmi (2015): Cserna-Szabó is one of the most original and authentic voices of contemporary Hungarian literature. He defies the norms, generic constraints and expectations of traditional literature and his prose – be it story-writing, novels or “gastro-thrillers” – is incomparable, enjoyable, and free.

Presented by: Müpa Budapest