Lajos Zilahy

Born in Nagyszalonta, Austria-Hungary (now Salonta, Romania), he studied law at the University of Budapest before serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War,[1] in which he was wounded on the Eastern Front – an experience which later informed his bestselling novel Two Prisoners (Két fogoly).

Gave all assets to government treasury in early 1940s for use in educating youth in world peace, which led to the establishment of Kitűnőek Iskolája.

Lajos Zilahy became the Secretary General of Hungarian PEN but his liberal views placed him at odds, first, with the right-wing Horthy regime and later with the post-war Communist government.

Zilahy left Hungary in 1947,[1] spending the rest of his life in exile in the US, where he completed A Dukay család, a trilogy of novels (Century in Scarlet, The Dukays, The Angry Angel) chronicling the history of a fictitious Hungarian aristocratic family from the Napoleonic era to the middle of the twentieth century.

Several of his novels have been translated into Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish (mainly), Swedish, and Turkish, and some of his plays into German, Italian, and Spanish.