This year the Hungarians celebrate their greatest poet prince, and yet the world will scarcely notice. His name is János Arany. He was born two centuries ago, on 2 March 1817, in what was then ...

Zagreb – Sarajevo – Podgorica – Belgrade So far, thousands of citizens across the territory of the former Yugoslavia have signed the Declaration on the Common Language. This Declaration ruffled a ...

Let me develop that thought by looking at another recent Hungarian book, Róbert Milbacher’s The Virgin Mary’s Fiancé. Humour, for me, is almost never absent from life. It’s absent mostly in art – in ...

Sonja Hansen is forty-something, unhappy, single, a Danish translator of Swedish crime novels, living in bustling, modern Copenhagen, originally from remote, rural West Jutland. She decides to learn ...

France’s election campaign was in full swing. The Conservatives and French far-right wing parties have done their best to bolster their ideas about national identity...

Novels can naturally be written about people who live on remote farms in the Markgraviate of Brandenburg or who spend their days in stately villas in even more elegant suburbs along the...

It could be his films, books or articles – for Karim Miské, everything revolves around one main question: belonging. From a young age, the son...

The French-Canadian comic book author Guy Delisle landed a bestseller with his illustrations from international hot spots like “Pyongyang”, “Birma” or “Jerusalem”. In his latest book, “Hostage” he...

It seems to me that there’s a theme in recent Hungarian literature, the literature of writers who grew up mainly in the seventies, and that is the theme of the unhappy child.

Is it possible, is it allowed? Can a convincing novel emerge when an author has barely gained perspective on current events? When she makes the characters think about Angela Merkel’s refugee policy ...