Ferenc Karinthy

Ferenc Karinthy (Budapest, 1921-1992) was a Hungarian novelist, playwright, journalist, editor and translator, and also a water polo champion. He wrote more than a dozen novels in Hungarian during the second half of the twentieth century. His work, unsettling in tone, explores miscommunication and the loss of familiar reference points in the modern city, which makes him a useful figure for understanding postwar Central European fiction.

The son of the writer Frigyes Karinthy, he studied literature and linguistics at Pázmány Péter University and earned a doctorate in linguistics in 1945. He worked as a script editor for theatres in Budapest and other Hungarian cities, and between 1957 and 1960 he translated writers such as Machiavelli and Molière into Hungarian. His life was marked by the death of his mother, the psychiatrist Aranka Böhm, who was killed in Auschwitz in 1944.

His first novel, Don Juan éjszakája, appeared in 1943. His best-known book, Epepe, written in 1970, follows a linguist stranded in a metropolis whose residents speak an unintelligible language. His diary, kept between 1969 and 1991, was published after his death. His novels won awards including the Baumgarten, Attila József and Kossuth prizes, and he is remembered today above all for Epepe.