The White King

It’s the Just William books teamed up with Nineteen Eighty-Four; a superb novel about childhood, schooldays and gang fights…Dragomán lets the narrative rip, shifting the characters around like he’s Stephen King or Elmore Leonard…sums up the lunacy of Ceausescu’s regime better than anything else I’ve read. – Tibor Fischer * Guardian *
Dragoman is superb at the paraphernalia of boyhood…so much intense experience is on offer…a poignant and big-hearted book, firing the imagination long after the pages have stopped turning – Charles Fernyhough * Sunday Telegraph *
A most impressive debut – Paul Bailey * Independent *
Electric, ominous, urgent…a coming of age tale with a difference * Daily Mail *
Sprawling, urgent, spilling with detail…at once charming and disturbing’ * Financial Times *
Disturbing, compelling, beautifully translated * The Times *
The structure suggests the way we tend to pluck an episode, a cluster of related encounters, from our past and endow it with an organic unity. Dragoman’s method of presentation here greatly reinforces his novel’s authenticity…imaginatively stimulating. – Paul Binding * Times Literary Supplement *
Dragoman’s lucid, energetic prose mingles this rite of passage scariness with the heart-in-mouth adrenalin of adolescence in the growing confidence of Datje’s compelling voice. * Financial Times *
A darkly fascinating examination of the contrast between childhood innocence and a totalitarian regime…a moving insight into a bizarre, tragic period of Europe’s history * Glasgow Herald *
This vivid portrait of a childhood in totalitarian Europe [has a] momentum that is irresistible, in which the unspoken story at the heart of the book comes into focus with the full force of an all too real nightmare * Metro *

Gyorgy Dragoman

Gyorgy Dragoman was born in Marosvasarhely, Transylvania in 1973 and moved to Hungary when he was fifteen. The White King was first published in its original Hungarian in 2005, where it won prizes and is now an iconic bestseller. It is now published in over thirty languages and has been made into a highly acclaimed English-language film.

Dragoman works as a translator. Among the works he has translated into Hungarian are short stories, essays, and texts by James Joyce, I. B. Singer, Neil Jordan, and Ian McEwan. The two most difficult novels he has ever translated are Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Samuel Beckett’s Watt. He lives in Budapest with his family.

Paul Olchvary

Paul Olchvary has translated many books for leading publishers, including Gyorgy Dragoman’s The White King, Andras Forgach’s No Live Files Remain, Adam Bodor’s The Sinistra Zone, Vilmos Kondor’s Budapest Noir, and Karoly Pap’s Azarel. He has received translation awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, and Hungary’s Milan Füst Foundation. His shorter translations have appeared in The Paris Review, New York Times Magazine, Kenyon Review, Tablet, AGNI, and Guernica. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

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