Péter Nádas

Born in Budapest in 1942, Nádas lost his mother to cancer as a teenager and, soon after, his father (who had worked within the Communist state apparatus before falling from favor) to suicide. He trained afterward as a press photographer and worked as a photojournalist for years before turning fully to fiction.

He spent more than a decade writing A Book of Memories, weaving three narrators together across late-Communist Budapest, prewar Berlin, and ancient Rome, and had to negotiate its content carefully past Hungarian censors before it finally appeared in 1986. Susan Sontag's championing of the English translation over a decade later, calling it the greatest novel of its era, transformed his international reputation almost overnight.

He followed it with Parallel Stories, an even more monumental multi-decade epic published in 2005, sustaining across both books the same extraordinarily patient, physically exhaustive attention to memory, desire, and surveillance under totalitarian rule.