Biography
Margit Halasz was born in 1964. Winner of The Life and Literature’s short story competition in 1998, she also publishes regularly in the best literary periodicals. She has won many literary prizes. Six of her independent prose volumes are now in publication and her work has appeared in numerous anthologies. Her short stories are translated onto Finn, Italian, English, Czech, Slovak, Polish and Arabic.
Her novels and stories are a mixture of the magical and the brutal, fantasy and striking social realism seem to play side-by-side. She depicts rural Hungary’s most down-trodden, most hopeless figures with compassion and great humour, capturing what is most human in them, and though we might define it this way or that, it is still literature. One critic, Károlyi Csaba expresses it thusly: In her prose there is something of the air of a Latin American story teller and also something of a Czech writer’s fresh perspective.
Margit Halasz also writes film scripts. The film made from her short story entitled Márió, the Magician, was awarded a Silver Remy prize at the 2008 Houston WorldFest film festival. She lives in Budapest where she is a teacher of Hungarian in a primary school.