Departures of note

Péter Nádas was born in Budapest in 1942 into a Jewish family and survived the wartime siege of the city. Orphaned young after his mother's death and his father's suicide, he studied journalism and photography and worked as a journalist before becoming a full-time writer in 1969. He settled in the village of Gombosszeg in western Hungary, where he lived for decades and where he died on 26 August 2026 at the age of 83.

Nádas gained international renown with his novels, notably A Book of Memories (1986), which took twelve years to write and drew comparisons to Marcel Proust, and the three-volume Parallel Stories (2005), an eighteen-year project exploring the intertwined histories of Hungarian and German families. His work, translated into many languages, was praised for its intellectual depth, formal experimentation, and unflinching treatment of the body, desire, and death.

He received numerous international honors, including the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the Kossuth Prize, the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the Würth Prize for European Literature, and was repeatedly mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate. He was elected to the Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Arts and the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.