The Peace Award is given by German publishers each year and is
a highly respected political award. This year the award has gone
to the Hungarian writer Peter Esterházy one of the founders
of the new Hungarian novel, with his works now translated into
more than 20 languages.
In the words of the preamble to the 2004 Peace Award, "Esterházy
has not only placed Hungary in the middle of Europe in a new way,
but also placed Europe in the middle of literature" and "uses
humour and irony as weapons in a fight against a violent world".
Esterhazy has said in an interview that irony is a view of life
that is forced upon us by the condition of the world. Esterházy
points out that the world today is not progressing towards peace
if we consider that at any single second, there is warfare somewhere
in the world.
Péter Esterházy was born in 1950 and lives in Budapest
with his wife and four children. Readers throughout Europe, and
especially in Germany and France, know him well. With several of
his novels published in Germany, he also writes for various German
newspapers regularly. The writer of Daisy, Helping Verbs of the
Heart, She Loves Me, A Little Hungarian Pornography, The Glance
of Countess Hahn-Hahn (Down the Danube), and The Book of Hrabal
provides his readers with a real Eastern European story through
the history of his own family in his major work, Celestial Harmonies:
A Novel. It is more than family history: Celestial Harmonies reveals
some of the peculiarities of Hungarian history and features a unique
linguistic creativity. But is it possible to enjoy a book based
on the playfulness of the Hungarian language for instance in German
translation? The writer believes the answer is yes: Péter
Esterházy reads his novels regularly to audiences abroad
and does not feel the translated texts as alien. Non-Hungarian
readers of his books probably feel the same: they come as close
to these novels as Hungarian readers do.
Esterházy approaches a novel as a finite whole. Before starting
a new book, he already has an overview of the entire piece of writing.
He can almost read the unwritten book because he already knows
every element of it. All the same, it is sometimes very difficult
to begin, one of the novels even opens with the sentence "we
cannot find the right words"
- and he was indeed looking for the first words for about a month.
Esterhazy likes prose: he says he is attracted to its calmness,
the sense of balance in the text. When he is asked if he believes
something new can still be achieved in literature, he says the
potentials of art have been fully utilized, everything has been
done already. However, "we can probably still add a few things,
because there always exists a personal point of view, and things
can be examined through that."
In addition to the 2004 Peace Award, Péter Esterházy
has won a number of international awards: they include the Vilenica
Award given to Central European writers, the Award of the Literary
Festival of Rome, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Björnson
Award, the Austrian State Award for European literature, and the
Herder Award. The writer is a member of the Széchenyi Academy
of Literature and Art, the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und
Dichtung, the Académie Européenne des Sciences, des
Arts et des Lettres, and the Akademie der Künste.
