It was not enough for me to recognize: I have moved. Thirty-three years is a great amount of time, enough for Christ's entire life story. I have been teaching in Hódmezővásárhely since September 1942, I have been living in Pest since April 1945. If I want to go to Debrecen, and when people are asking: where are you going just now, I answer: home. As she later confessed: 'There is only one place I never name, this is Debrecen. Her close ties to her hometown, though severed by geographical distance when she moved to Budapest in 1944, were never really cut. She conversed with her father in Latin, German, English, and French, attended the University of Debrecen, studying Latin and Hungarian, then went on to work as a teacher throughout the German and Soviet occupations of Hungary in 19. Magda Szabó’s own life also echoes the trauma the war brings into the lives of her characters. Born into an old Protestant family in Debrecen, Hungary’s “Calvinist Rome” in 1917, she was raised by her literary-gifted parents, who created a fairy-tale world for her (which was the inspiration for her novels Islands and Lala the Fairy). Published both in England and in the US, Abigail, the most popular of Szabó’s books in Hungary, is finally available for the English reading public as well.įollowing the successes of The Door (2006) that Literary Hub has selected to be one of the ten best translated novels of the decade, and Katalin street (2017), for which translator Len Rix received the 2018 PEN Translation Prize, Abigail is the third novel in a loose trilogy about the impact of war on those who have to live with the consequences. Not that she has ever been forgotten, but Magda Szabó is back in the literary limelight thanks to Len Rix’s new translation of her novel Abigail (2020) what The New York Times calls: “ harrowing and mesmerising”, and Publishers Weekly deems a “ rollicking delight”. The recent English translation of her novel Abigail allows us to revisit the oeuvre of the grande dame of Hungarian literature.

Az ajto szabo magda