Aegon Art Award

Aegon 2020 · Shortlist

Évszakhoz képest hűvösebb

AITitle translated by AI:“Cooler Than Usual for the Season”

Anita Harag · 31 when first published

Short stories · 132 pages · Family

AIAI-generated summary:Stories that see familiar situations from unexpected angles: someone trying to cope at a multinational without the language, someone sorting out a dead father's house, someone trying to reach a grandmother with dementia.

Aegon 2020 · Shortlist

Életünk végéig

AITitle translated by AI:“To the End of Our Lives”

Ferenc Barnás · 60 when first published

Novel · 456 pages · Family, Love

AIAI-generated summary:A historian of philosophy, recovered from a breakdown, falls in love with a much younger woman, then learns too late of his mother's death and begins to suspect it was not cancer.

Also: Libri 2020 shortlist

Aegon 2020 · Shortlist

A vidék lelke

AITitle translated by AI:“The Soul of the Countryside”

László Csabai · 50 when first published

Short stories · 344 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Stories in three linked parts, in which a tale begun in one era continues in another, or one event is seen from three sides, uncovering the depths of seemingly simple lives in the Hungarian countryside.

Aegon 2020 · Shortlist

Bolyai

Zsolt Láng · 61 when first published

Novel · 460 pages · Historical, Family

AIAI-generated summary:The life of the nineteenth-century mathematician János Bolyai and his troubled bond with his father, alongside a present-day writer studying his chaotic papers in a Swiss monastery.

Also: Libri 2020 ★ winner

Aegon 2019 · Shortlist

Akik már nem leszünk sosem

AITitle translated by AI:“Those We Will Never Be”

Dénes Krusovszky

Novel · 540 pages · Family, Historical

AIAI-generated summary:A fatal car crash near Iowa City in 1990, a young man's flight from Budapest to his teenage hometown in 2013, a sanatorium confession, and a 1956 protest that turns into a pogrom.

Also: Libri 2019 shortlist

Aegon 2019 · Shortlist

Verseim

AITitle translated by AI:“My Poems”

Edina Szvoren · 44 when first published

Short stories · 212 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Thirteen stories whose narrators live very different lives in the same urban world, glimpsed like the separate flats of the high-rise across the street.

Also: Libri 2019 ★ winner

Aegon 2019 · Shortlist

Rendszerújra

AITitle translated by AI:“System Restart”

György Dragomán · 45 when first published

Short stories · 260 pages · Speculative

AIAI-generated summary:Stories from fifteen years about systems, political, natural or technical, real or imagined, and about the chances people find to break out of them.

Also: Libri 2019 shortlist

Aegon 2019 · Shortlist

Nílus

AITitle translated by AI:“Nile”

István Kemény · 57 when first published

Poetry · 88 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Poems that open with one river poem and close with another, between the Danube and the Nile, on history and the present, passing time and eternity.

Also: Libri 2019 shortlist

Aegon 2019 · Shortlist

Hasítás

AITitle translated by AI:“Splitting”

László Garaczi · 62 when first published

Novel · 158 pages · Autofiction, Coming of age · Egy lemur vallomásai, book 5

AIAI-generated summary:A narrator moves back and forth between his early childhood, his teenage years, his first steps as a writer and his thirties, hanging around a Budapest square and drifting through Paris and Berlin.

Aegon 2019 · Shortlist

Két obeliszk

AITitle translated by AI:“Two Obelisks”

László Márton · 59 when first published

Novel · 240 pages · Love, Historical

AIAI-generated summary:In autumn 1913 Karl K., a Viennese journalist, meets the young baroness Sidonie N.; they fall in love, but their planned marriage falls through before the war, and twenty years later they meet again in Switzerland.

Aegon 2019 · Shortlist

Rókák esküvője

AITitle translated by AI:“The Foxes' Wedding”

Márton Simon · 34 when first published

Poetry · 106 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Poems like a recorded inner monologue, in which the line between the living and the dead blurs and a deer or a fox can wander into a sentence.

Also: Libri 2019 shortlist

Aegon 2019 · Shortlist

Szeméremékszerek. A két steril pohár

Ottó Tolnai · 78 when first published

Novel · 381 pages · Szeméremékszerek, book 1

AIAI-generated summary:Sent to the pharmacy by his wife, T. Olivér wanders through the border spa town of Palić until a misread gesture lands him with the border guard, who search his document cases stuffed with stories.

Aegon 2019 · Shortlist

Mágneshegy

AITitle translated by AI:“Magnet Hill”

Réka Mán-Várhegyi · 39 when first published

Novel · 382 pages · Satire

AIAI-generated summary:In 1999 a sociologist in her thirties returns from New York to Budapest, unable to write, and becomes involved with a star colleague who has affairs with his students.

Also: Libri 2019 shortlist

Aegon 2018 · Shortlist

Nyírj a hajamba

AITitle translated by AI:“Cut into My Hair”

Ádám Nádasdy · 70 when first published

Poetry · 58 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Poems from 2009 to 2017 in which loneliness, love and struggle turn into persons, leading through humid tropical forests and tide-washed shores, foreign landscapes made familiar only through comparison.

Aegon 2018 · Shortlist

Omertà

Omerta

Andrea Tompa · 46 when first published

Novel · 724 pages · Historical, Politics, Love

AIAI-generated summary:In 1950s Cluj, under a tightening Communist dictatorship, a peasant woman, a young city girl, a nun and a rose breeder tell how their lives cross, and how they fall into a love triangle.

Also: Libri 2018 ★ winner

Aegon 2018 · Shortlist

Story of a Stammer

Egy dadogás története

Gábor Vida

Novel · 412 pages · Family, Autofiction, Historical

AIAI-generated summary:A writer growing up near Arad in Romania tells his own life and his parents', and those of earlier generations, between the Hungarian border and the Székely Land, to invent himself a homeland.

Also: Libri 2018 shortlist

Aegon 2018 · Shortlist

Ünnep

AITitle translated by AI:“Celebration”

Krisztina Tóth · 50 when first published

Poetry · 116 pages

AIAI-generated summary:A selection of poems from seven earlier collections, chosen by the poet László Lator and published for the author's fiftieth birthday.

Aegon 2018 · Shortlist

Létbüfé

AITitle translated by AI:“Snack Bar of Being”

Lajos Parti Nagy · 64 when first published

Poetry · 248 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Poems written since 2000 by the poet's invented alter ego, a craftsman of existence who wanders from a hospital garden to the snack bar of being, elegies on language and life near death.

Also: Libri 2018 shortlist

Aegon 2018 · Shortlist

Szindbád, a forradalmár

AITitle translated by AI:“Szindbád the Revolutionary”

László Csabai · 48 when first published

Novel · 872 pages · Crime, Historical, Politics · Szindbád, book 3

AIAI-generated summary:Back in the town of Nyárliget after a forced spell in Siberia, the detective Szindbád becomes an officer of the new people's democracy's police, watched by colleagues and superiors who distrust his past.

Aegon 2018 · Shortlist

Egyformák vagytok

AITitle translated by AI:“You're All the Same”

Noémi Szécsi · 41 when first published

Novel · 240 pages · Family, Satire · Nyughatatlanok, book 3

AIAI-generated summary:In today's Budapest an outspoken publishing lawyer back from England and a highly strung historian advising on a period TV series talk their way through an elite house party, the ruin-bar district and a film set.

Aegon 2018 · Shortlist

Valahol itt

AITitle translated by AI:“Somewhere Here”

Péter Kántor · 68 when first published

Poetry · 132 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Poems written between 2012 and 2017 about home and its loss, where private and public life meet, from Kossuth Square around the corner from the poet's flat to paintings by Vermeer, Van Gogh and Francis Bacon.

Aegon 2018 · Shortlist

Célia

Zsuzsa Rakovszky · 67 when first published

Novel · 312 pages · Family

AIAI-generated summary:In present-day Budapest a man learns, years after the fact, that he became a father by chance, and his daughter Célia, in her twenties and practically a stranger, enters his life needing his help.

Aegon 2017 · Shortlist

Megint hazavárunk

AITitle translated by AI:“We're Expecting You Home Again”

Árpád Kun · 51 when first published

Novel · 420 pages · Autofiction, Migration, Family

AIAI-generated summary:In October 2006 a family of four sets out in a battered Suzuki to cross Europe, leaving Hungary to make a home in the north, while the narrator, who shares the author's name, looks back on a childhood in Sopron.

Aegon 2017 · Shortlist

Egy mormota nyara

AITitle translated by AI:“A Marmot's Summer”

Gábor Németh

Novel · 208 pages

AIAI-generated summary:A novel that turns real experiences into fiction, keeping the closeness of a diary while telling one man's story of human conflicts that are also debated in politics and social theory.

Also: Libri 2017 shortlist

Aegon 2017 · Shortlist

Orgia

AITitle translated by AI:“Orgy”

Gábor Zoltán · 56 when first published

Novel · 320 pages · Historical, War

AIAI-generated summary:In the last days of the Second World War, Budapest's fascist Arrow Cross militiamen carry out mass killings, and the story is told from their side.

Also: Libri 2017 shortlist

Aegon 2017 · Shortlist

Válogatott esszék 1979–2016

AITitle translated by AI:“Selected Essays 1979–2016”

György Spiró · 70 when first published

Nonfiction · 384 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Essays from nearly four decades on writers and works, historical movements and Slavic culture, from the provinces of the ancient world to the closed world of Central Europe.

Aegon 2017 · Shortlist

Őszi hadjárat

AITitle translated by AI:“Autumn Campaign”

János Térey · 46 when first published

Poetry · 816 pages

AIAI-generated summary:A selection of thirty years of poems, many reworked, together with a book's worth of new ones, set in a mythical landscape of Debrecen, Budapest and Dresden.

Also: Libri 2017 shortlist

Aegon 2017 · Shortlist

Világadapter

AITitle translated by AI:“World Adapter”

Krisztina Tóth · 49 when first published

Poetry · 80 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Poems set off by cities, objects, people and irritating or comic incidents, which follow a path to an understanding of everyday yet essential things: time passing, drifting apart, pain and loss.

Aegon 2017 · Shortlist

Amíg másokkal voltunk

AITitle translated by AI:“While We Were with Others”

László Szilasi · 52 when first published

Novel · 292 pages · Historical

AIAI-generated summary:Three linked short novels follow three Hungarian poets living as outcasts, Babits in Szeged, Jókai in hiding after the crushed revolution and Bessenyei in his native Tiszabercel, each preparing for a great achievement.

Aegon 2017 · Shortlist

Alakváltók

AITitle translated by AI:“Shapeshifters”

Róbert Csaba Szabó · 35 when first published

Novel · 264 pages · Historical, Politics, Crime

AIAI-generated summary:In 1954, in a drought-stricken Romania ruled by Gheorghiu-Dej, two men who have looted and killed buy false passports and set out for Yugoslavia, in a story framed by the revolution of 1989.

Aegon 2017 · Shortlist

The Most Beautiful Night of the Soul

A lélek legszebb éjszakája

Sándor Jászberényi · 36 when first published

Short stories · 200 pages · War

AIAI-generated summary:Stories narrated by a disillusioned Hungarian war correspondent who escapes a dishonest world into war zones, alcohol, opium and brief love affairs across the Middle East and Africa.

Also: Libri 2017 ★ winner

Aegon 2016 · Shortlist

The End

A vége

Attila Bartis · 47 when first published

Novel · 600 pages · Love, Politics

AIAI-generated summary:In a small town in Communist Hungary, a boy loses his mother and moves to Budapest with his father, where he grows up to become a photographer whose life is driven by images and by love.

Also: Libri 2016 shortlist

Aegon 2016 · Shortlist

Az ország legjobb hóhéra

AITitle translated by AI:“The Country's Best Hangman”

Edina Szvoren · 41 when first published

Short stories · 186 pages · Family

AIAI-generated summary:Stories of strange, close relationships: the country's best hangman moves in next door, a mother may see her child only at feeding times, someone lives with a shop dummy.

Also: Libri 2016 shortlist

Aegon 2016 · Shortlist

Oroszlánkórus

AITitle translated by AI:“Lion Choir”

György Dragomán · 42 when first published

Short stories · 250 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Stories in which music, from jazz and heavy metal to a Viennese waltz, helps people overcome fear and grief, bear the pain of love and longing, or find a home in a foreign country.

Also: Libri 2016 shortlist

Aegon 2016 · Shortlist

Hideghullám

AITitle translated by AI:“Cold Wave”

János Marno · 66 when first published

Poetry · 192 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Poems that unfold as an unbroken conversation, moving between the inner labyrinths of memory and language and the well-trodden paths around the Gesztenyéskert park in Buda.

Aegon 2016 · Shortlist

A Legkisebb Jégkorszak

AITitle translated by AI:“The Smallest Ice Age”

János Térey · 45 when first published

Novel · 624 pages · Speculative, Politics

AIAI-generated summary:In 2019, volcanic eruptions in Iceland plunge Europe into a sudden cold, and a Hungarian consul evacuated from Reykjavík returns to a Budapest sliding into a volcanic winter. A novel in verse.

Also: Libri 2016 shortlist

Aegon 2016 · Shortlist

Bokáig pezsgőben

AITitle translated by AI:“Ankle-Deep in Champagne”

Pál Réz · 85 when first published

Nonfiction · 368 pages

AIAI-generated summary:A spoken memoir in which a veteran literary editor recalls, in conversation with a poet, the Hungarian writers and poets he worked with and befriended over six decades.

Also: Libri 2016 shortlist

Aegon 2016 · Shortlist

A bűnös

AITitle translated by AI:“The Guilty One”

Péter Esterházy · 65 when first published

Novel · 80 pages · Crime

AIAI-generated summary:A short book written alongside a painter's watercolour diary, in which a writer who once promised murder stories to go with the pictures ends up telling the story of a single killing.

Also: Libri 2016 shortlist

Aegon 2016 · Shortlist

A dögeltakarító

AITitle translated by AI:“The Carcass Cleaner”

Zoltán Danyi

Novel · 264 pages · War, Migration

AIAI-generated summary:A young Hungarian man from Novi Sad who has lived through the Yugoslav wars looks for safety and freedom, drifting from Split to Budapest and Berlin while America beckons as a way out.

Aegon 2016 · Shortlist

Fortepan

Zsuzsa Rakovszky · 65 when first published

Poetry · 72 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Poems that start from old photographs found in an online archive, bringing their frozen figures back to life through monologues, descriptions of pictures and the shadows of objects.

Also: Libri 2016 ★ winner

Aegon 2015 · Shortlist

Agyag és kátrány

AITitle translated by AI:“Clay and Tar”

Ferenc Szijj · 56 when first published

Poetry · 152 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Poems of observation and description set in disused railway buildings, empty wagons, ruined industrial sites and bleak suburban streets, where people are present only through their traces in light and shadow.

Aegon 2015 · Shortlist

The Bone Fire

Máglya

György Dragomán · 41 when first published

Novel · 480 pages · Coming of age, Family, Politics

AIAI-generated summary:After the dictator has been shot, thirteen-year-old Emma, who has lost her home and her parents, is taken in by a grandmother she has never known, in a country where the unburied past is still painfully alive.

Aegon 2015 · Shortlist

Átkelés Budapesten

AITitle translated by AI:“Crossing Budapest”

János Térey · 44 when first published

Short stories · 119 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Stories in verse that look into the curtained rooms and hearts of Budapest, from the Óbuda gasworks to Kőbánya and Terézváros, from the recent past to the near future.

Aegon 2015 · Shortlist

Űrérzékeny lelkek

AITitle translated by AI:“Space-Sensitive Souls”

József Havasréti · 50 when first published

Novel · 364 pages · Speculative

AIAI-generated summary:Drawn into the mysterious work of A. J. Suler, a Russian doctor with an adventurous life, a group of people trace the survivors and consequences of a psychedelic experiment that went wrong, from Siberia to California.

Aegon 2015 · Shortlist

Pillanatragasztó

AITitle translated by AI:“Superglue”

Krisztina Tóth · 47 when first published

Short stories · 221 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Twenty-five stories, each a snapshot of Hungary over the past quarter-century, whose characters stand before turning points but keep putting off the leap.

Aegon 2015 · Shortlist

A harmadik híd

AITitle translated by AI:“The Third Bridge”

László Szilasi · 50 when first published

Novel · 349 pages · Crime

AIAI-generated summary:Over a single day in Szeged, a former emigrant back from Canada, a detective returned from Germany and a street musician who never left tell their lives, starting from a recent class reunion.

Aegon 2015 · Shortlist

Természetes fény

AITitle translated by AI:“Natural Light”

Pál Závada · 60 when first published

Novel · 622 pages · War, Historical

AIAI-generated summary:Before, during and after the Second World War, men and women from Békés county, Hungarian Hungarians, Hungarian Slovaks and Hungarian Jews, are thrown into killing, forced labour, captivity and resettlement.

Aegon 2015 · Shortlist

Egyszerű történet vessző száz oldal – a Márk-változat

AITitle translated by AI:“A Simple Story Comma One Hundred Pages: The Mark Version”

Péter Esterházy · 64 when first published

Novel · 118 pages · Family, Historical

AIAI-generated summary:A family deported to the middle of nowhere in the godless mid-twentieth century: two brothers, one drawn to words and the other to God, a mother who pleases no one, a father who drinks.

Aegon 2015 · Shortlist

Aludnod kellene

AITitle translated by AI:“You Should Sleep”

Tibor Noé Kiss · 38 when first published

Novel · 142 pages

AIAI-generated summary:On a run-down former estate settlement somewhere in recent Hungary, missing even from maps, a few people live among the ruins, seven men and a teenage girl whose personalities slowly dissolve.

Aegon 2014 · Shortlist

Két szimpla a Kedvesben

AITitle translated by AI:“Two Espressos at the Kedves”

Ágnes Gergely · 80 when first published

Nonfiction · 208 pages · Historical, War

AIAI-generated summary:A memoir of a golden childhood on the Great Hungarian Plain, of war and persecution, questions of identity, the factories, theatres and university of the early 1950s, and a life as a teacher and then a poet.

Aegon 2014 · Shortlist

Fejtől s lábtól

AITitle translated by AI:“At the Head and at the Feet”

Andrea Tompa · 42 when first published

Novel · 486 pages · Historical

AIAI-generated summary:Around 1900, a lonely man and a lonely young woman, two doctors hungry for knowledge and useful work, meet the city of Kolozsvár and the culture of bourgeois Transylvania.

Aegon 2014 · Shortlist

Vadnai Bébi

Géza Bereményi · 67 when first published

Novel · 293 pages · Historical, Love, War

AIAI-generated summary:In 1970s Budapest, Dobrovics, a young writer who suspects that a friend may be his brother, starts to investigate the friend's father, and the trail leads back to the dazzling Bébi Vadnai of the 1940s.

Aegon 2014 · Shortlist

Akvárium

AITitle translated by AI:“Aquarium”

Krisztina Tóth · 46 when first published

Novel · 322 pages · Family, Historical

AIAI-generated summary:A girl adopted at the end of the 1940s, her foster parents, her own child and her husband live in a run-down Budapest tenement, a cramped and transparent aquarium where everyone takes lovelessness as normal.

Aegon 2014 · Shortlist

Szindbád Szibériában

AITitle translated by AI:“Sinbad in Siberia”

László Csabai · 44 when first published

Novel · 589 pages · Crime, Historical, War

AIAI-generated summary:Szindbád, a detective taken prisoner by the Soviets, struggles to survive in a labour camp near Lake Baikal, until someone steals the camp commander's precious rifle and Szindbád works out who did it.

Aegon 2014 · Shortlist

The World Goes On

Megy a világ

László Krasznahorkai · 59 when first published

Short stories · 288 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Stories and speeches in three parts, in which a narrator speaks, then tells, then takes his leave, encountering Gagarin, a flightless Okinawan rail, a homeless man in the Berlin metro and Nietzsche in Turin.

Also: International Booker 2018 shortlist

Aegon 2014 · Shortlist

Egyszerű történet vessző száz oldal – a kardozós változat

AITitle translated by AI:“A Simple Story Comma One Hundred Pages: The Swordfighting Version”

Péter Esterházy · 63 when first published

Novel · 250 pages · Historical

AIAI-generated summary:In the seventeenth century, a hard woman who knows how to love, and so how to hate, lives among men such as a Pál Nyáry, a cook who knows great menus by heart, and a prince who has people watched and reported on.

Aegon 2014 · Shortlist

The Dispossessed

Nincstelenek

Szilárd Borbély · 50 when first published

Novel · 288 pages · Coming of age, Family

AIAI-generated summary:A boy grows up in a poor village where his family must always keep silent, never say who they are and never mix with the peasant children, because they will always be the scapegoats.

Aegon 2014 · Shortlist

Tiltott nyelv

AITitle translated by AI:“Forbidden Language”

Zsuzsa Takács · 75 when first published

Poetry · 91 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Poems of homage to masters, a farewell to a dying relative, dream poems and confessions in the guise of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, their elegiac tone eased by delicate humour and irony.

Aegon 2013 · Shortlist

Barátaim, akik besúgóim is voltak

AITitle translated by AI:“My Friends, Who Were Also My Informers”

Balázs Györe · 61 when first published

Novel · 189 pages · Politics, Autofiction

AIAI-generated summary:A book of friendship and betrayed friendship that tells the story of a confidential secret-police investigation through documents, informers' reports, assessments and quotations from the author's earlier writing.

Aegon 2013 · Shortlist

Kossuthkifli

AITitle translated by AI:“Kossuth Crescent”

Béla Fehér · 63 when first published

Novel · 335 pages · Historical, War, Satire

AIAI-generated summary:From the window of a speeding green stagecoach, the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848–49 rolls past: freedom, love, war and peace, intrigue, crime, loyalty, greatness and downfall.

Aegon 2013 · Shortlist

Nincs, és ne is legyen

AITitle translated by AI:“There Is None, Nor Should There Be”

Edina Szvoren · 38 when first published

Short stories · 158 pages · Family

AIAI-generated summary:Stories centred on the family, the main arena and model of our lives, uncovering with dry humour the dramas that play out beneath the small events of everyday relationships.

Aegon 2013 · Shortlist

Pók a víz alatt

AITitle translated by AI:“Spider Under Water”

György Ferdinandy · 77 when first published

Short stories · 299 pages · Historical

AIAI-generated summary:Sixty-one short fragments of memory, seven stories of human helplessness and a screenplay about a tennis court between 1940 and October 1956, seen by a teenager as the genteel middle class falls apart.

Aegon 2013 · Shortlist

A királynál

AITitle translated by AI:“At the King's”

István Kemény · 51 when first published

Poetry · 70 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Poems that read like ordinary everyday sentences at first glance and reveal their hidden meaning slowly, among them a farewell letter that renews Hungarian public poetry.

Aegon 2013 · Shortlist

M. L., a gyilkos

AITitle translated by AI:“M. L., the Murderer”

László Márton · 53 when first published

Short stories · 189 pages

AIAI-generated summary:One story and two short novels that drive their events forward by setting seemingly ordinary characters and situations, charged with huge inner tension, against each other.

Aegon 2013 · Shortlist

Bűnhődés

AITitle translated by AI:“Atonement”

László Végel · 71 when first published

Nonfiction · 172 pages

AIAI-generated summary:A diary of the writer's life in Berlin: a Hungarian intellectual from Novi Sad, shaped by belonging to minority after minority, immerses himself in a cultural world that had once been only a dream for him.

Aegon 2013 · Shortlist

Kicsi Lili

AITitle translated by AI:“Little Lili”

Orsolya Karafiáth · 36 when first published

Novel · 266 pages · Love

AIAI-generated summary:Lia, thirty, looks back on two stormy relationships, her love for Mari, her secondary-school teacher, and her bond with Lili, her charming but brutally cold boss, and wonders if she can ever learn to say no.

Aegon 2013 · Shortlist

Amikor még csak az állatok éltek

AITitle translated by AI:“When There Were Only Animals”

Zsófia Bán · 55 when first published

Short stories · 212 pages · Family, Historical

AIAI-generated summary:Fifteen stories in which the intellect meets the animal within, and behind which a twentieth-century Central European family's troubled history emerges, seen by a mother and a daughter, with the fathers absent.

Aegon 2012 · Shortlist

The Birds of Verhovina

Verhovina madarai

Ádám Bodor · 75 when first published

Novel · 255 pages · Speculative

AIAI-generated summary:In Verhovina, a remote place where the train runs irregularly and the timetable has been abolished, Brigadier Korkodus's foster son waits at the run-down station for a barefoot boy sent over from a reformatory.

Aegon 2012 · Shortlist

Pixel

Pixel

Krisztina Tóth · 44 when first published

Novel · 240 pages · Love

AIAI-generated summary:Chapters that work like pixels, each a whole in itself and each devoted to one part of the body, gradually reveal links between people and couples who collide and meet by chance across time and place.

Aegon 2012 · Shortlist

Négy hét az élet

AITitle translated by AI:“Life Is Four Weeks”

Lajos Grendel · 63 when first published

Novel · 279 pages · Family, Politics

AIAI-generated summary:Sanyi recalls his childhood in a provincial town and its vanished community: eccentric, slightly dotty gentlemen, dreamy aunts in love, and a huge walnut tree under which his family once ate so many lunches.

Aegon 2012 · Shortlist

parsifal, parsifal

Mátyás Varga

Poetry · 60 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Poems whose fleeting, lower-case figures revive the Grail legend of blood, body, desire and holiness, grafting the knight's quest onto the everyday loves, disappointments and longings of people today.

Aegon 2012 · Shortlist

Apám helyett

AITitle translated by AI:“In Place of My Father”

Péter György · 57 when first published

Nonfiction · 306 pages · Family, Historical, Politics

AIAI-generated summary:How did a Hungarian boy, a Christian of Jewish origin, get from the Bor labour camp to the Hungarian far right at the end of his long life? A son retraces his father's past to answer the question.

Aegon 2012 · Shortlist

Bogárvérrel

AITitle translated by AI:“With Beetle Blood”

Péter Horváth · 60 when first published

Novel · 446 pages · Historical

AIAI-generated summary:In Selmecbánya, a mining town where anything can happen, a small crippled gnome of a man becomes the helpless servant of the monastery's priests and of the town in every sense of the word.

Aegon 2012 · Shortlist

Semmi kis életek

AITitle translated by AI:“Trifling Little Lives”

Sándor Zsigmond Papp · 39 when first published

Novel · Politics, Satire

AIAI-generated summary:The residents of a "doll's house" on Törekvés Street in a small town in communist Romania cling to small, tangible pleasures under Ceaușescu's glass dome, through love, parades, betrayal and fear.

Aegon 2012 · Shortlist

Szemünk előtt vonulnak el

AITitle translated by AI:“They Pass Before Our Eyes”

Szilárd Borbély · 48 when first published

Drama · 340 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Plays that borrow the forms of ancient tragedy, the mystery play, the theatrical parable and the fairground farce to stage present-day Hungary: stammering ignorance, social helplessness and aggression.

Aegon 2012 · Shortlist

A föld állatai

AITitle translated by AI:“Animals of the Earth”

Zsolt Láng · 53 when first published

Novel · Bestiárium Transylvaniae, book 4

Aegon 2011 · Shortlist

Pertu

AITitle translated by AI:“On First-Name Terms”

Edina Szvoren · 36 when first published

Short stories · 245 pages

AIAI-generated summary:A debut collection of stories that show the nauseating complexity of human relationships, each creating an unmistakable atmosphere in every sentence.

Aegon 2011 · Shortlist

ő(szike)

Géza Aczél · 63 when first published

Poetry · 80 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Long, internally rhymed autobiographical poems, elegiac and self-ironic, in which the poet recalls and re-examines his memories of poetry, literature and his own literary career.

Aegon 2011 · Shortlist

Tavaszi Tárlat

AITitle translated by AI:“Spring Exhibition”

György Spiró · 64 when first published

Novel · 285 pages · Historical, Politics, Satire

AIAI-generated summary:A man who checks into hospital a few days before the 1956 revolution and stays there until it is crushed is spared from deciding anything, but the reprisals and the return to everyday life of 1957 still await him.

Aegon 2011 · Shortlist

Szakadás

AITitle translated by AI:“Rupture”

Győző Ferencz · 56 when first published

Poetry · 150 pages

AIAI-generated summary:A collection of the poems the poet wrote over a fairly long period, a decade and a half.

Aegon 2011 · Shortlist

Protokoll

AITitle translated by AI:“Protocol”

János Térey · 40 when first published

Novel · 401 pages · Satire, Love

AIAI-generated summary:Ágoston Mátrai, chief of protocol at the Foreign Ministry, cultured, charming, well-off and hypersensitive, wonders whether that is enough for happiness, and which woman he should choose.

Aegon 2011 · Shortlist

Pénteken vasárnap

AITitle translated by AI:“Sunday on Friday”

László Bertók · 75 when first published

Poetry · 88 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Twelve-line poems written over seven years about the moment, the one that seems to last forever and the one that flashes and vanishes, as the poet nears seventy and reads the signals of his body.

Aegon 2011 · Shortlist

Arc és hátraarc

AITitle translated by AI:“About Face”

László Garaczi · 54 when first published

Novel · 172 pages · Coming of age, Autofiction · Egy lemur vallomásai, book 3

AIAI-generated summary:A young man nicknamed Csont does his compulsory military service in a barracks of the Hungarian People's Army in Kalocsa, watching the routine, pranks and humiliations with the estrangement of a lemur.

Aegon 2011 · Shortlist

Szentek hárfája

AITitle translated by AI:“Harp of Saints”

László Szilasi · 46 when first published

Novel · 317 pages · Historical, Crime

AIAI-generated summary:In the 1920s, in the Great Church of a town called Haragos, the student Tamás Grynaus kills a wealthy farmer, Mátyás Omaszta, and both the body and the killer vanish from the scene.

Aegon 2011 · Shortlist

A Testhez

AITitle translated by AI:“To the Body”

Szilárd Borbély · 47 when first published

Poetry · 170 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Odes and legends centred on suffering, which bring to life the memories of the Holocaust's nameless survivors and the testimonies of mothers who lost their unborn children and of humiliated women.

Aegon 2010 · Shortlist

Sötét tus, néma tinta

AITitle translated by AI:“Dark Ink, Silent Ink”

András Ferenc Kovács · 50 when first published

Poetry · 164 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Poems written over seven years and arranged in four cycles, which recall the earlier periods and voices of the poet's work as they meet the traditions of Japanese poetry.

Aegon 2010 · Shortlist

Ezer és 3

AITitle translated by AI:“A Thousand and Three”

Endre Kukorelly · 58 when first published

Novel · 267 pages · Love

AIAI-generated summary:A novel that speaks with open frankness about women, the body and the futility of marriage, in a radical rewriting of the story of Anna Karenina.

Aegon 2010 · Shortlist

Autobiographies of an Angel

Egy angyal önéletrajzai

Gábor Schein · 40 when first published

Novel · 234 pages · Historical, Family

AIAI-generated summary:An angel tells two lives far apart in time and place: that of Johann Klarfeld, a German of the eighteenth century, and that of Berta Józsa, born in Hungary in 1943, through four generations of her family.

Aegon 2010 · Shortlist

Kedves ismeretlen

AITitle translated by AI:“Dear Unknown”

István Kemény · 48 when first published

Novel · 467 pages · Coming of age, Family, Historical

AIAI-generated summary:Tamás Krizsán stumbles from childhood into youth in a settlement near Budapest that is neither town nor village, in a family whose every member is searching for the ultimate meaning of life.

Aegon 2010 · Shortlist

Magas labda

AITitle translated by AI:“High Ball”

Krisztina Tóth · 42 when first published

Poetry · 60 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Poems in two halves: one rethinks the Hungarian verse tradition, sometimes seriously, sometimes playfully; the other dwells on everyday situations pushed to an edge where tragedy and catharsis lie.

Aegon 2010 · Shortlist

Virágzabálók

AITitle translated by AI:“Flower Gluttons”

László Darvasi · 47 when first published

Novel · 672 pages · Historical, Love

AIAI-generated summary:In nineteenth-century Szeged, a city of Hungarians, Germans, Serbs, Jews and Roma, three men try to win Klára Pelsőczy, a woman born with a red mark on her palm, as floods, fire and the 1848 revolution sweep through.

Aegon 2010 · Shortlist

Hallásgyakorlatok

AITitle translated by AI:“Ear Training”

Mátyás Varga

Poetry · 44 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Forty minimalist poems, forty fragments of experience of caring, loving, falling and salvation, in which attention moves with its changing subject while distrusting language.

Aegon 2010 · Shortlist

Anyakép, amerikai keretben

AITitle translated by AI:“Portrait of a Mother in an American Frame”

Miklós Vajda · 78 when first published

Nonfiction · 207 pages · Family, Historical

AIAI-generated summary:A sheltered boy grows up with his governess in a wealthy Budapest family in the 1930s while his mother shines in high society, and their bond is tested by anti-Jewish laws and a show trial.

Also: Aegon 2009 shortlist

Aegon 2010 · Shortlist

Szép Magyar Szótár

AITitle translated by AI:“Beautiful Hungarian Dictionary”

Szilárd Podmaniczky · 46 when first published

Short stories · 710 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Five thousand very short stories arranged in alphabetical order, from A to Z, part of which first appeared week by week in a literary weekly between 2003 and 2008.

Aegon 2009 · Shortlist

Kinek Észak, kinek Dél

AITitle translated by AI:“North for Some, South for Others”

Attila Balázs · 53 when first published

Novel · Historical

AIAI-generated summary:A writer who left Novi Sad returns to the place where he grew up, the Yugoslav world of Vojvodina, now in ruins, and asks what a homeland stretching across vast distances of time and space can mean.

Aegon 2009 · Shortlist

Halál Budán

AITitle translated by AI:“Death in Buda”

Gergely Péterfy · 42 when first published

Novel · Historical, War

AIAI-generated summary:Michele d'Aste, a young Neapolitan baron who is looking for death, follows the armies of the Holy League from the siege of Vienna to the siege of Ottoman-held Buda in 1686.

Aegon 2009 · Shortlist

A pecsenyehattyú és más mesék

AITitle translated by AI:“The Roast Swan and Other Tales”

Lajos Parti Nagy · 55 when first published

Short stories · 58 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Thirteen folk tales from many countries, chosen and illustrated by a graphic artist and retold as new tales: why a shoe of flea skin comes in handy, why the sea tastes of salt and what befell a Portuguese chick in Lisbon.

Aegon 2009 · Shortlist

Seiobo There Below

Seiobo járt odalent

László Krasznahorkai · 54 when first published

Short stories · 451 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Stories ranging across ages and cultures, from biblical times to the present, whose true heroes are works of beauty, made by people or by nature, perfect, purposeless and impossible to resist.

Aegon 2009 · Shortlist

Amit láttál, amit hallottál

AITitle translated by AI:“What You Saw, What You Heard”

László Márton · 49 when first published

Short stories · 358 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Eighteen playful and chilling stories that uncover unsuspected dimensions of everyday life in today's Hungary, where telling what happened collides with how people would like to see it.

Aegon 2009 · Shortlist

Anyakép, amerikai keretben

AITitle translated by AI:“Portrait of a Mother in an American Frame”

Miklós Vajda · 78 when first published

Nonfiction · 207 pages · Family, Historical

AIAI-generated summary:A sheltered boy grows up with his governess in a wealthy Budapest family in the 1930s while his mother shines in high society, and their bond is tested by anti-Jewish laws and a show trial.

Also: Aegon 2010 shortlist

Aegon 2009 · Shortlist

Idegen testünk

AITitle translated by AI:“Our Foreign Body”

Pál Závada · 54 when first published

Novel · 391 pages · Historical, War, Love

AIAI-generated summary:In September 1940 Janka Weiner gathers relatives, lovers and friends, Swabian, Hungarian, Jewish and half-Jewish, in a Budapest photographer's studio, all stirred by Hungary's territorial gains and its race laws.

Aegon 2009 · Shortlist

Semmi művészet

AITitle translated by AI:“No Art”

Péter Esterházy · 58 when first published

Novel · 224 pages · Family, Autofiction

AIAI-generated summary:A son brings his dead mother back to life in a book: a woman who knows the offside rule and sees the world through the language of football, against which the son and everyone else take their measure.

Aegon 2009 · Shortlist

Trója-variációk

AITitle translated by AI:“Troy Variations”

Péter Kántor · 59 when first published

Poetry

Aegon 2008 · Shortlist

Az az íz

AITitle translated by AI:“That Taste”

Ádám Nádasdy · 60 when first published

Poetry · 70 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Poems of memories and remains that circle around the great things in life, above all love, recalling colours, scents and objects in Mediterranean sunlight with a Central European irony.

Aegon 2008 · Shortlist

Életjáradék

AITitle translated by AI:“Life Annuity”

Bálint Solymosi · 48 when first published

Novel · 369 pages · Coming of age

AIAI-generated summary:An essayistic novel that follows its hero from birth to late adolescence, seen through the eyes of the grown man he will become.

Aegon 2008 · Shortlist

Ördöglakat

AITitle translated by AI:“Puzzle Lock”

Dezső Tandori · 69 when first published

Poetry

AIAI-generated summary:A bibliophile collection of aphorisms, drawn aphorisms, visual poems and opinions, the language puzzles and emotional drawings of one man, which gradually thickens into a kind of novel.

Aegon 2008 · Shortlist

Ondrok gödre

AITitle translated by AI:“Ondrok's Hollow”

Imre Oravecz · 64 when first published

Novel · Family, Historical, Migration · A rög gyermekei, book 1

AIAI-generated summary:In Szajla, a village in northern Hungary, the peasant Árvai family slowly rises in the world, its members facing the choice between staying on the land and emigrating.

Aegon 2008 · Shortlist

A gyerek

AITitle translated by AI:“The Child”

János Háy · 47 when first published

Novel · Coming of age, Family

AIAI-generated summary:A boy grows up in the dust and mud of a Hungarian village in the 1970s and 1980s and wonders whether he can become a great man, a philosopher, or whether the wine jug of his father and grandfathers awaits him too.

Aegon 2008 · Shortlist

Az egyetlen lehetőség

AITitle translated by AI:“The Only Possibility”

László Lator · 80 when first published

Poetry · 252 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Selected poems by a poet of few, dense poems, whose almost only subject is creation: conception and birth, the pleasure of existence and its longing to remake itself, in short, love.

Aegon 2008 · Shortlist

Semmi baj

AITitle translated by AI:“No Problem”

Pál Békés · 51 when first published

Short stories · 316 pages · Historical

AIAI-generated summary:Longer tales and Kafkaesque short pieces form the life of a man born in 1956, who spends the October uprising as a silent baby and meets his first hopes and defeats in the dull years of the Kádár era.

Aegon 2008 · Shortlist

Nyolc perc

AITitle translated by AI:“Eight Minutes”

Péter Farkas · 52 when first published

Novella · 112 pages · Love

AIAI-generated summary:An old man and an old woman go through their daily rehearsals for death, as memory fails and the body breaks down, held together by the one thing that may outlast it all: love.

Aegon 2008 · Shortlist

Night School: A Reader for Grownups

Esti iskola

Zsófia Bán · 50 when first published

Short stories · 270 pages · Satire

AIAI-generated summary:A mock textbook for adults whose lessons cover self-help, geography, chemistry and French, among them young Flaubert's journey to Egypt and a last message from the dog Laika before her launch into space.

Aegon 2008 · Shortlist

A megtévesztő külsejű vendég

AITitle translated by AI:“The Guest of Deceptive Appearance”

Zsuzsa Takács · 69 when first published

Short stories · 224 pages

AIAI-generated summary:A poet's first book of prose: stories full of sudden shifts and sharp cuts, with scenes that slip out of reason's control into a feverish dream world, sometimes deadly, sometimes boldly erotic.

Aegon 2007 · Shortlist

Hazatérés Hellaszból

AITitle translated by AI:“Homecoming from Hellas”

András Ferenc Kovács · 47 when first published

Poetry · 274 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Hungarian versions of poems by Constantine Cavafy that had never appeared in Hungarian: poems he disowned, poems he acknowledged, poems left unpublished, and the two Athenian notebooks found in 2001.

Aegon 2007 · Shortlist

Elhagy

AITitle translated by AI:“Leaves”

Anna T. Szabó · 34 when first published

Poetry · 128 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Sixty-six poems about the body, its beauty and decay, and the anatomy of feelings and relationships: pregnancy, watching a child, a man's bare foot, the last movements of the dying.

Aegon 2007 · Shortlist

The Ninth

A kilencedik

Ferenc Barnás · 47 when first published

Novel · 176 pages · Coming of age, Family

AIAI-generated summary:In 1968, in a quiet village outside Budapest, a boy born ninth into a large, poor and devoutly Catholic family grows up under a tyrannical father and a Communist state, knowing hunger and fear.

Aegon 2007 · Shortlist

Élőbeszéd

AITitle translated by AI:“Living Speech”

István Kemény · 45 when first published

Poetry · 80 pages

AIAI-generated summary:A collection of new poems by one of the leading poets of the generation that emerged in Hungary in the 1980s.

Aegon 2007 · Shortlist

Követés

AITitle translated by AI:“Pursuit”

Iván Sándor · 76 when first published

Novel · Historical, War

AIAI-generated summary:In Budapest in December 1944, during the weeks of Arrow Cross terror and the siege, an investigation follows the Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz and his family as he works to save tens of thousands of lives.

Aegon 2007 · Shortlist

Házasságon innen és túl

AITitle translated by AI:“This Side of Marriage and Beyond”

János Háy · 46 when first published

Short stories · Love

AIAI-generated summary:Stories of lovers who become wives and wives who become lovers, of the married and the divorced, of those who still love and those who no longer remember, all of them overtaken in the end by death.

Aegon 2007 · Shortlist

Ultra

János Térey · 36 when first published

Poetry · 148 pages

AIAI-generated summary:New poems written from 2002 to 2006, long meditative pieces and dense short ones, which argue with their readers, with high and popular culture and with the great Hungarian poets of the past.

Aegon 2007 · Shortlist

Barcode

Vonalkód

Krisztina Tóth · 39 when first published

Short stories · 226 pages · Coming of age

AIAI-generated summary:Stories that return to a childhood shaped by the 1970s, when a barcode marked everything that came from the West, and to the fears and reflexes the era left behind: anxiety, exclusion, and still, a childhood that was not all bad.

Also: Warwick Prize 2023 shortlist

Aegon 2007 · Shortlist

A fagyott kutya lába

AITitle translated by AI:“The Frozen Dog's Leg”

Lajos Parti Nagy · 53 when first published

Short stories · 226 pages

AIAI-generated summary:Stories from ten years, set in a world built out of language stretched to its limits, that confront the reader with the tragic everyday experiences everyone is forced to live with.

Aegon 2007 · Shortlist

MetaXa

László Garaczi · 50 when first published

Novel · 150 pages · Love

AIAI-generated summary:One sentence, two women, and a man who nearly dies of it: an artist torn between his love for two women, who cannot find his place among his feelings or in the world.

Aegon 2007 · Shortlist

Csikágó

Pál Békés · 50 when first published

Novel · Historical

AIAI-generated summary:The tenements and galleried courtyards of Csikágó, the Budapest quarter around the Keleti railway station, and the gangsters and bootleggers of the real Chicago are woven together across a century of the district's residents.

Aegon 2007 · Shortlist

Gyerekgyár

AITitle translated by AI:“Baby Factory”

Pál Ficsku · 39 when first published

Novel · 211 pages · Family, Satire

AIAI-generated summary:Kund Bulvár, a bon vivant who lives off fake news, travels from a remote village to Budapest for sperm tests: he wants a child with his third wife, Paula, and the couple must turn to a fertility clinic.

Aegon 2007 · Shortlist

Milyen egy női mell?

AITitle translated by AI:“What Is a Woman's Breast Like?”

Zoltán Kőrösi · 44 when first published

Novel · Family, Historical, Love

AIAI-generated summary:Nearly two centuries of two families, the Orliks, who came to Hungary from Galicia, and the Flaschners, who settled from Moravia, whose tangled histories merge into the story of one Hungarian family.