Ádám Péter

College teacher, newspaper editor, specialist and literary translator, essayist, mediator of French literature and culture. He lives in Budapest.

After completing secondary school (1964), he studied Hungarian and French at the University of Debrecen (KLTE), then at the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest (1965-1973). Meanwhile, from 1967 to 1969, he was a student at the University of Poitiers in France.

In an interview, he said that in 1968 he was sentenced to four and a half months in prison for what he called “incitement”[1] For twenty years, his reviews of articles in the French press were published in the press review section of the social science journal Reality. From 1973 to 1979, he served as “French secretary” of the Hungarian PEN Club. In 1979, he was one of the signatories of a petition in solidarity with the convicted leaders of the Charter ’77, protesting against political trials.[2]

After being invited by the editor-in-chief László Kéry, he was head of the French section of the world literary magazine Nagyvilág from 1978 to 1992. He taught in higher education for more than ten years. Between 1992-1996 he was an adjunct professor at the French Department of the Egri Teacher Training College and in 1997-1998 at the ELTE Teacher Training College, and from 2002 he was first an associate professor and then an assistant professor at the French Department of the Kodolányi János College in Székesfehérvár. He retired in December 2007. He obtained his doctorate (Phd) in 2008 from the University of Debrecen with a dissertation on “The constitutional order and political institutions of France”.