Sándor Csoóri passed away

Sándor Csoóri was born in 1930 in Zámoly in a Calvinist peasant family. He burst onto the literary scene with his poems in August 1953. His first book was published the following year, and from 1958 he worked as a freelance writer, and from 1968 to 1988 as a dramaturge for Mafilm.

He was one of the leading figures of the opposition intellectuals in Hungary, he was under constant surveillance during the Kádár regime (thousands of pages of documents testify to this), and although his poetry books were published, he was not seriously recognised until the fall of communism – he was awarded the Kossuth Prize only in 1990.

His poetry intersected folk traditions with the influences of modern European poetry, allowing a looser poetic imagination to play a greater role in his poems. This direction is strengthened from his work “Második születésem” (Second Birth) (1967), and from then on his poetry is characterised by its own, objectively visionary voice and a risky boldness that bets everything on metaphors. Sándor Csoóri taught us that writing is not just an often self-consuming display of talent – it is also a moral act.