Péter Nádas
Péter Nádas (born 14 October 1942) is a Hungarian writer, playwright, and essayist. He was born in Budapest to a Jewish family. During World War II his mother carried him to safety, and they returned to Budapest before the siege. He survived the siege with his mother in his uncle’s flat. His parents were involved with the Communist movement, but Péter and his brother were baptized in the Calvinist church.
His mother died when he was 13. His father committed suicide in 1958, and Péter became an orphan at 16. He studied journalism and photography from 1961 to 1963, then worked as a journalist in the mid-1960s. Since 1969 he has been a freelancer.
Nádas has lived mainly in Hungary but spent time in Berlin, where he was a fellow and a member of German arts academies. He married Magda Salamon in 1990; they had been together since 1962 and lived in a village in western Hungary.
His first novel, The End of a Family Story, appeared in 1977. A Book of Memories (1986) is one of his best-known works; it took twelve years to write and explores how people relate to one another. In 2005 he published the three-volume Parallel Stories, a long, interconnected novel about two families, one Hungarian and one German.
Nádas has written many other novels and essays; death and memory are common themes. He has received several awards, including the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1991) and the Würth Prize (2014). His work has been translated into English, and he has been nominated for the Nobel Prize.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 10:14 (CET).