Sándor Oliver Murányi

It was Odorheiu Secuiesc that sent Sándor Murányi Olivier as a messenger to Hungarian literature, probably with the instruction to proclaim that Europe can be seen from Odorheiu Secuiesc, and that in Europe, Odorheiu Secuiesc is not an insignificant small town. His prose draws from Hungarian history, from sacrality, from the drawing of eccentric figures born of small-town life, but with unabashed confidence and self-assurance he pulls the sacred down into the profane and lifts the profane up into the higher region. The inner world of the young Transylvanian Hungarian literature leads him to caricatures, and his linguistic humour lives with the vocabulary of this inner world as much as with the Transylvanian traditions. His path takes him higher and higher.

Dr. István Fried
Herder Prize-winning literary historian

Its volumes

• Empty and Full, Foundation for Transylvanian Hungarian Literature, 2007
• Pushed up to sainthood, Transylvanian News Publisher, The Foretold Outpost Lodge, 2007
• Zordok, the Szekler Samurai, Kalligram Publishing House, 2012
• Medvenéző, Új Forrás Kiadó – Alutus, 2017
• The bears are not late, New Source Publishing – Alutus, 2021
• River Dance, Lector Publishing – New Source Publishing, 2022

Awards, scholarships

• First prize winner of the Ady Society of Oradea prose competition (2004)
• Doctoral student of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2004-2007)
• Repeated recipient of a scholarship from the Falud Academy of the Hungarian Jesuit Order (2004-2007)
• Erasmus Programme Doctoral Scholarship, Florence, Italy (2007)
• Transylvanian Hungarian Writers League – Avantgarderobe Award (2007)
• Communitas Creative Fellowship (2008)
• Doctoral student of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2008)
• Ministry of Education and Culture – Nándor Gion Prose Writing Fellowship (2009)
• Domus Scholar of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2011)
• Literary Present Prize for Literary Prose (2011)
• National Cultural Fund grant (2012)
• The National Cultural Fund’s Benedek Elek Creative Grant (2014)
• Ex Libris Prize (2014)
• National Cultural Fund grant (2016)
• Bertha Bulcsu Memorial Prize (2016)
• National Cultural Fund Creative Grant (2018)
• National Cultural Fund Creative Grant (2020)