Péter Esterházy

Born in Budapest in 1950 into the Esterházy family, once among Hungary's grandest aristocratic dynasties and patrons of Haydn, Esterházy grew up after the Communist takeover stripped the family of its estates and deported them to a village as forced agricultural laborers, a humiliation that shadows his entire body of work.

He trained as a mathematician and worked briefly in the field before devoting himself to a dense, playful, aggressively intertextual postmodern fiction. Celestial Harmonies, published in 2000, wove centuries of his family's history into an extended tribute to his father.

Shortly after finishing it, newly opened secret police archives revealed that his father had spent decades as a paid informant, reporting on friends, colleagues, and family alike. Esterházy answered with Revised Edition, quoting his father's own surveillance reports directly and unraveling the earlier book's tribute in real time. He wrote candidly about his final illness before dying of pancreatic cancer in 2016.