György (George) Konrád (2 April 1933 – 13 September 2019)[1] was a Hungarian novelist, pundit, essayist and sociologist known as an advocate of individual freedom.

His father, József Konrád, ran a hardware business; his mother was Róza Klein, a member of a Nagyvárad Jewish middle-class family.

Konrad's parents were arrested and deported to Austria after the German invasion of Hungary, and the two children and two cousins travelled to relatives in Budapest, a day before all Jewish inhabitants of Berettyóújfalu were sent to the ghetto in Nagyvárad, and on to Auschwitz.

[citation needed] He made his living through ad hoc jobs: he was a tutor, wrote reader reports, translated, and worked as a factory hand.

Between 1960 and 1965 Konrad was employed as a reader at the Magyar Helikon publishing house, where he was chief editor of works by Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Babel, and Balzac.

It was published abroad by Suhrkamp, Seuil, Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, and Philip Roth's Penguin Series, with a foreword by Carlos Fuentes.

Shortly after the completion of The Intellectuals (intended for foreign publication), the political police bugged and searched Szelényi's and Konrád's apartments.

The book's subtitle was Central-European Meditations, and it was to become one of the voices demanding that region's secession from the Soviet bloc as a requisite for peace in Europe.

Critics have compared his essays to the writings of Adam Michnik, Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, Czeslaw Milos and Danilo Kiš.

Beginning in September 1982, he was a year-long guest at the Wissenschaft-skolleg zu Berlin; the following year he received a fellowship at the New York Institute for the Humanities.

This was the period when Konrád primarily penned those essays and diary entries that would be collected for the volume The Invisible Voice (Hungarian version 1997).

In the first years after the fall of the old regime, beginning in 1989, Konrád took an active part in public life in Hungary, and was one of the thinkers who paved the way for the transition to democracy.

During his presidency, he received the Internationale Karlspreis zu Aachen (2001) and the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2003).

Though Konrád frequently portrayed his Berettyóúfalu childhood in his novels, and particularly in The Feast in the Garden, he attempted to present this period in a more precise documentary form in two books, Departure and Return (2001) and Up on the Hill During a Solar Eclipse (2003).

These portraits are modeled primarily on friends, some still living – descriptions that constitute a continuation of the series presented by Konrád in his book The Writer and the City (2004) together with longer essays.

His family stated that he had been gravely ill.[2] György Konrád received the highest state distinctions awarded by France, Hungary, and Germany: Officier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’Honneur (1996); the Hungarian Republic Legion of Honor Middle Cross with Star (2003); Das Grosse Verdienstkreuz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (2003).