Péter Bognár

Péter Bognár, born in 1982, is the author of several poetry volumes, plays, and what he himself has called an ‘anti-detective novel series’. He is the winner of the Tibor Déry, Békés Pál, Petri György, and Artisjus awards, and is also an expert on old Hungarian literature. He has been publishing poems since 2003, with his first collection, Sajna-sebaj (‘Sorry Not to Worry’), appearing in 2005, followed by Bulvár (‘Tabloid’) in 2012, then A rodológia rövid története (‘A Brief History of Rodology’) in 2015, which ingeniously disguises itself as a collection of studies on a pseudo-science, and A fényes rend (‘The Bright Order’) in 2017, which claims to be his ‘found’ childhood notebook. In 2022, he moved on to his detective novels with Hajózni kell, élni nem kell (‘To Sail Is Necessary, to Live Is Not’), followed in 2023 by Minél kevesebb karácsonyt (‘The Less Christmas, the Better’), two crime novels about a civil guard (a volunteer policeman) in rural Hungary who knows Plutarch’s Parallel Lives by heart. The third instalment was published in 2025 under the similarly curious title Elmész, visszajössz, sose halsz meg (‘You Leave, You Come Back, You Never Die’), expanding the series into a trilogy. Bognár is an author who strives to expand the frontiers of contemporary literature by combining his spirit of experimentation and exploration with meticulous planning and painstaking deliberation. Be it prose or poetry, the secret of Bognár’s arresting, comic language lies precisely in its rigorous form and precise execution. Bognár’s sentences are not placed next to each other ad hoc; his stories, which can span across several novels, give form to grand concepts, while his aforementioned spirit of discovery opens up new subplots in side stories, as if daylighting underground rivers. His novels are a blend of widely diverging genres, styles and registers.