November 25th 1953 was a black day in the history of English football, with the Hungarian national team beating the unbeaten-for-90-years English team 6:3 at Wembley. The Queen’s men didn’t have much more luck last year, either, when the Hungarian Writers’ League won the European Championship. October 3rd will be the day of revenge, on both the pitch and literary grounds. The English-Hungarian Writers’ League match will kick off at noon at the Alsóörs Stadium and continue as an English language oral duel at Merlin in Budapest at 8 p.m.. It’ll be an improvisational literary evening, where an audience will be able to witness a battle of literary wits played out between six huge and exciting contemporary talents.
On the English side will be author of speculative fiction/goalkeeper, Graham Joyce; Whitbread Award winning novelist/midfielder, Patrick Neate and writer/left wing, Craig Taylor, who’ll do their best to keep the Hungarians at literary bay. The Hungarians will prepare for the duel with their own big shots: writer, Endre Kukorelly; translator, Miklós M. Nagy and poet and novelist Péter Zilahy, who’ll compete to keep the triumph of old intact.
We spoke to Peter Zilahy, who’ll be moderating on the night, about the event.
What can people expect from 6:3 Reloaded at Merlin?
A couple of good laughs and some good one-liners, for sure.
Who will be judging the duel, and how?
It won’t be a real duel, just a friendly international, as we are not native speakers of English; we are only nicknamed the Brazilians of the Writer’s Leauge.
How familiar are you (the Hungarian team) with the British writers’ works?
I know many of them, they have good writers in their team.
Will October 3rd be the first time you’ve all met?
No, we have beaten England twice. The first time was in Florence, 2:0, and the last time was in Malmo, 3:1.
The Hungarian team will be comprised of two poets/novelists and a translator – how did you select the team?
We are all writers. The so called translator has written a brilliant non-fiction book and I read some of his fiction too, which I had great fun reading. He is only called a translator because he has translated dozens of classics and he is one of the best in the country. The other two members of the Hungarian team are the best known international authors present.
Are you more confident about winning the football match or the literary duel?
We hope to win the game and have fun at night; I am sure our English sports will do a great job.
The Lineup
PÉTER ZILAHY is a many-sided author, whose prose and poetry are widely translated and who often performs on stage, combining photography and interactive media in his work. His collection of poems, Statue Under a White Sheet Ready to Jump, was published in 1993 and has won the Móricz Zsigmond Prize. His dictionary novel, The Last Window Giraffe, was published in 1998 and has since been translated into 18 languages. The author has had exhibitions all over Europe and has performed new media presentations based on the book – and on The Last Window Giraffe CD-ROM – in 28 countries. Since 1998, Zilahy has been senior editor of The World Literature Series, first at Jak Books and later at Gondolat Publishers. In 2001, he was a visiting scholar at New York University. In 2007, he published a collection in Budapest with the title Három plusz 1 written in seven genres. In May 2007, his theatre play Der lange Weg nach nebenan was performed in Volksbühne, Berlin. The author regularly publishes his essays in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in the Tagesspiegel, in Die Welt as well as the Observer and Time Out Magazine.
ENDRE KUKORELLY is one of Hungary’s leading poets, as well as an acclaimed prose author. In the 1980s, he worked as an editor and correspondent for several literary reviews. For the past ten years he has been co-editor of the weekly review Magyar Narancs (‘Hungarian Orange’) and the Hungarian Lettre Internationale. Presently, he teaches creative writing at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. Literary critics were quick to acknowledge the poet, and in 1985 he received the Hungarian Literature Prize for the best debut collection, in 1992 the Vilenica Prize and in 1993 the prestigious József-Attila Prize. His works have been translated into 15 languages.
MIKLÓS M. NAGY essayist, critic, translator, editor. He deals with modern Russian literature in his 1996 essay collection, Nikkelszamovár. In his works, he addresses questions on philosophical, moral and psychological issues… oh, and football. He translated numerous works from authors like Joseph Heller, E. L. Doctorow, John Updike, Nick Hornby, Roddy Doyle, Bret Easton Ellis, Vladimir Nabokov, Tatyjana Tolsztaja. Presently he is the chief editor of Európa Könyvkiadó (publishing house).
CRAIG TAYLOR is a Canadian journalist and playwright currently living in London. His work has appeared in publications including The Guardian, The New York Times and the Globe And Mail. Working within both fiction and non-fiction, he’s responsible for One Million Tiny Plays About Britain, published in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine – three of which were printed on handbags and presented to winners at the Cannes Film Festival. He publishes his own photocopied magazines, including The Review of Everything I’ve Ever Encountered and Dark Tales of Clapham. His first book, Return To Akenfield, was published by Granta in 2006.
GRAHAM JOYCE grew up in the UK mining village of Keresley, before marrying and moving to the Greek island of Lesbos, and then Crete, where he penned the novel, The House of Lost Dreams – which he named after the shack he lived in. In Greece, he wrote Dreamside, and Requiem later emerged from time spent in Jerusalem. Joyce’s work has been termed speculative fiction, though both publishers and critics have had difficulty classifying him. The terms fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mainstream literature have been used, with genres often overlapping. The mystical or supernatural often play a pivotal role in Joyce’s work, and some have termed him Magic Realist, in the vein of writers like Gabriel García Márquez or Julio Cortázar. He disagrees, though, seeing his lineage as tied more closely to writers of the English “weird tale”, and terms his style “Old Peculiar”. He’s received numerous awards, and nowadays, in addition to his own writing work, he teaches Creative Writing to students at Nottingham Trent University.
PATRICK NEATE has been published in most major UK newspapers and magazines, including The Washington Post, The Independent, The Face, The Times, The Telegraph, Marie Claire, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Harpers and Queen, Mixmag, Time Out, Tatler and The Sunday Telegraph. He often takes a foreign culture and goes on to explore the nature of story itself and the power of stories to create identities, as well as the nature of humanity, all of which are injected with fierce humour. His work has spanned myster thriller, social observation and critique… and hip-hop, and his non-fiction analysis of hip-hop, Where You’re At: Notes from the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet, won the 2004 National Book Critics’ Circle Award (USA). He also wrote the screenplay for the film The Tesseract, adapted from the novel by Alex Garland. A passionate supporter of literary diversity, Neate founded Book Slam with Ben Watt (of UK act Everything But The Girl), the UK’s most successful storytelling salon, where writers, poets and singer-songwriters perform in a nightclub environment.
6:3 Reloaded
Date: October 3 at 8 p.m.
Merlin
Language: English
Entry: Free
Moderator: Péter Zilahy