The White King

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Eleven-year-old Djata makes sure he is always home on Sundays. It is the day the State Security came to take his father away, and he believes it will be a Sunday when his father is finally sent home again. In the mean time, Djata lives out a life of adventure. He plays wargames in flaming wheat fields; hunts for gold in abandoned claymines; watches porn in a backroom at the cinema, and plays chess with an automaton. But lurking beneath his rebel boyhood, pulling at his heartstrings, is the continued absence of his father. When he finally uncovers the real truth, he risks losing his childhood for ever. With THE WHITE KING, György Dragomán won the prestigious Sándor Márai prize. An urgent, humorous and melancholy picture of a childhood behind the Iron Curtain it introduces a stunning new voice in contemporary fiction.

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György Dragomán was born in Transylvania in 1973 and moved to Hungary when he was fifteen. He has been a film critic, journalist, translator, interpreterand web designer. Among the works he has translated into Hungarian are short stories, essays and texts by James Joyce, I. B. Singer, Neil Jordan and Ian McEwan. The White King was first published in its original Hungarian in 2005, when it won the József Attila Prize, the Tibor Déry Prize and the Sándor Márai Prize. It is due to be published in twenty-two languages. György Dragomán lives in Budapest with his wife and two children. He is at work on his next novel. For more information on György Dragomán and his books, see his website at www.gyorgydragoman.com