Sándor Márai

Born on 11 April 1900, Márai worked as a journalist, poet, and novelist in Hungary through the interwar years. After World War II, he left his homeland and lived in exile for over four decades, writing in a language few could read outside Hungary. He died on 21 February 1989, just months before the Iron Curtain fell. His work remained obscure in translation until well after his death, when reissues revealed the surgical clarity of his prose and his unsparing examinations of friendship, betrayal, and the fading codes of a lost Europe.