Antal Szerb

Elected President of the Hungarian Literary Academy in 1933, aged just 32, he published his first novel, The Pendragon Legend (which draws upon his personal experience of living in Britain) the following year.

Szerb also translated books from English, French, and Italian, including works by Anatole France, P. G. Wodehouse, and Hugh Walpole.

Given numerous chances to escape anti-Semitic persecution (as late as 1944), he chose to remain in Hungary, where his last novel, a Pirandellian fantasy about a king staging a coup against himself, then having to impersonate himself, Oliver VII, was published in 1942.

In the ten years before the Second World War, he wrote two monumental works of literary criticism, characterized by a brilliant and ironic style intended for an educated reader rather than an academic public.

England and, in particular, London, hosted Szerb for a year and not only suggested to him new and interesting directions for his research, but also offered him the background for his first novel.

Utas és holdvilág (literally, "Traveler and Moonlight"), published in 1937, focuses on the development of the main character, Mihály - a bright and romantic, albeit conflicted, young man who sets off for a honeymoon in Italy with his new wife, Erzsi.

He then leaves his wife for his own journey through the Italian countryside and eventually Rome - figuratively tracing the sparkling fanaticisms of his juvenile imagination, even rekindling bonds with changed (and some unchanged) childhood friends - all among the impressive foreign landscapes and peculiar liveliness of its inhabitants.

Szerb also published an interesting diary, The Third Tower, recounting his travels to the cities in the north of Italy - Venice, Bologna, Ravenna.

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