Niki

Hungarian dissident Tibor Dery’s novella has been deservingly rescued from obscurity in a flawless translation by Edward Hyams. While the book is the story of a dog in extraordinarily sustained and focused doggy detail, it also conveys more about the emotional and psychological toll of repression than a dozen history books…Theaccount of Niki’s life with its exquisite observations of her behaviour and character is utterly charming yet devoid of sentimentality. One certainly doesn’t have to be a dog person to enjoy writing of such precision and beauty. Guardian

Tibor Dery (1894-1977) was born in Budapest into a prosperous family of partly Jewish descent. In 1919, he joined the Communist Party and served in the ill-fated revolutionary government of Bela Kun, which collapsed before the end of the year. For much of the next fifteen years he lived in exile, returning to Hungary for good in 1935. Though initially well-regarded by Hungary’s post-World War II Communist government, by 1953 Dery had been expelled from the party for his criticism of its increasingly repressive policies. He then supported Imre Nagy’s reformist government and, after the Soviet suppression of the 1956 uprising, was sentenced to nine years in prison. Writers around the world (including Camus, Sartre, E.M. Forster, Rebecca West, and Alberto Moravia) rallied on his behalf, and in 1960 Dery was not only granted amnesty but allowed to publish and travel in relative freedom. Among Dery’s major works are Love and Other Stories, the novel The Unfinished Sentence, and an autobiography, No Verdict.

George Szirtes is a Hungarian-born English poet and translator. He received the T.S. Eliot Prize for Reel (2004), and his New and Collected Poems were published in 2008. As a translator of poetry and fiction he has won a variety of prizes and awards, including the European Poetry Translation Prize and, in fact, the Dery Prize.

Edward Hyams won the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for Joan of Arc- By Herself and Her Witnesses by Regine Pernoud.

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