Leonard Lopate had me on his show in New York:

I talked to Harriett Gilbert about The White King in London, for the BBC World Service book programme, The Word. It aired yesterday, (February 5. 2008) and is can be listened to online, here.

Update: the link above takes you to the weekly actual issue of The Word which is allways a pleasure to listen to. Someone was kind enough to to send me a recording of my interview:

James Smith from Booktrust reviews The White King on the site:

“György Dragomán has succeeded in conjuring up not only a realistic voice for his young protagonist but also a sense of what it means to live in a country in which the state security services watch your every move and can take you away at any time”

The full review is here.
There is an interview as well, we talk about the book, and we look into the issue of translation:

I am interested in the fact that you are a translator from English into Hungarian, but that someone else translated your book into English. Can you explain how that feels?

I have done my share of translations, so I must tell you that being on the other side of the process was a marvellous feeling. I really appreciate my translator’s work, because I know very well how enormously difficult and challenging translation can be. Sometimes it is even more demanding than writing, as you have to take apart and recreate the original text in a matter of months, while you are subjected to the emotional weight of the text in a condensed way.For example when I was translating Beckett’s Watt there was a moment when I felt that translation as such should be impossible, you can give all you have got, but it still won’t work. After a few days of utter depression I realized that my problems were not technical, but rather emotional, the despair emanating from the text was coming down on me. So translation made me live through a genuine moment of the beckettian ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ experience.

Tollef Mjaugedal interviewed me for Cappelen’s book club in Norway. The interview will be published translated into Norvegian, here is the English version: 

You grew up in Romania, but later moved to Hungary - is that right?
Were there any special reasons for your family moving – and do you think this has influenced your writing?
Yes I was born in Romania as part of the Hungarian minority living there. I spent the first fifteen years of my life in Marosvásárhely, which is a town in the region historically known as Transylvania. We left Romania in the autumn of 1988. The situation in Romania in the eighties became more and more brutal, my father who thought at the University of Medicine (he was professor of stomatology) was accused of ethnic bias and separatism (Romanian socialism was a very nationalist sort of socialism) lost his job, and was constantly harassed by the secret police, (questionings, house searches) and our family was “encouraged” to leave the country. In an absurd way the process of getting a passport and permission for emigration lasted for almost three years, (the harassment did not stop) during this time both my parents were unemployed, so we had to sustain ourselves by selling almost everything on the flea market.
These experiences undoubtedly have made their mark on my writing, my parents treated me as an adult throughout the whole process, and this meant I was lucky enough to have firsthand experiences about the way a closed society works. Read the rest of this entry »

Erzsébet Eszéki interviewed me for Culture.hu Here is an excerpt.

Your novel set in Romania reveals a terribly tough world. Not a very happy childhood. But from the perspective of a child, “from down under,” brutality and dictatorship can be very well presented. Is this why you opted for a child protagonist? Or was it because of the mode of storytelling, because the story sounds more dramatic this way?

These considerations probably all contributed to it, but it was not such a conscious or premeditated decision. All of a sudden I heard the voice of Djata (the narrator of the novel) describing the brutal football training in the Wold’s End chapter and this voice was so powerful and intensive that perhaps I could not have suppressed it even if I had wanted to. More than hearing his voice, I somehow saw through his eyes and I could describe this semi-fictional world as an eleven-year-old saw it or would have seen it. Many people refuse to believe that the book bears only a trace of autobiography.(…)

For the long version, with photos go to culture.hu

Sarah Nelson talked to me about The White King for the Publisher’s Weekly daily run at the Frankfurt Bookfair. Go here for the whole interview: PN online

György Dragomán talked to PW about his second novel The White King, a coming-of-age story set in a totalitarian society

Q: Obviously, the first question to ask is: How autobiographical is this novel about a young boy whose father is “disappeared” by a repressive government?
A: Many of the events in the book didn’t happen exactly the way they did in my life, but they could have. My father was not taken away permanently, but he would be taken in and questioned for days at a time. I grew up [in a Romania] that was much like the setting [never named] in this book. But, for example, in the book, I have a scene of boys fighting each other with hammers; that never happened like that, but my friends and I did talk about fighting with hammers and had even picked out what hammers we would have used.
Q: Do you consider this a political book, or a coming-of-age story, or both?
A: I wanted to write about freedom in a society where freedom is not possible. In that case it is political. I spent my youth in a society similar to that of The White King: you are denied the power of reflection. You don’t really realize that your life could be otherwise, which is precisely the way most children feel about their childhoods. (…)

For the rest see: PN online

György Dragomán: ‘one can really see how a dictatorship functions through the eyes of a child’

English translation of an interview I gave to Caffeé Babel on the first leg of my Polish Book tour in Warsaw. The original can be found here: http://www.cafebabel.com/en/article.asp?T=T&Id=11310

The Transylvania-born Hungarian author, 34, uses an unconventional narrator to express the horrors of a totalitarian system

György Dragomán appears to be flabbergasted by the popularity of his latest exceptional book, The White King. I meet him as the collection of childhood stories from Communist Hungary, showing how Communism and suffering of the time robbed people of their individuality, has its grand premiere in its Polish edition at the popular ARTistic (meaning more wannabies than artists) pub in the Wola neighborhood of Warsaw.

The bespectacled Dragomán is unusually humble and quiet for someone so hugely successful. The Romania-born author has lived in Hungary for the past twenty years. He has translated classics by Beckett, Joyce and even Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting into Hungarian. His last name - ‘Dragomán’- even means ‘translator’ and ‘guide’ in Middle Eastern countries. Amongst his stories and plays, his first novel Genesis Undone (2002) was awarded the Sandor Brody Award. His second novel The White King was recently released across Europe, and garnered the Déry Tibor and Sándor Márai top Hungarian literary awards.

Goalkeeper avoiding the ball

‘Four years ago, I turned on the television and saw Helmut Ducadam, a Romanian goalkeeper for Steaua Bucharest man who everyone thought had disappeared,’ says Dragomán, explaining how the idea of a child protagonist came unexpectedly to life. Read the rest of this entry »