Wednesday 16 May, 6.30pm–9pm
The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB

European Literature Night
featuring the Hungarian writer Noémi Szécsi

The annual European Literature Night is back for its fourth year in London, taking over the capital cities of Europe for a whole evening in a marathon celebration of the best of European literature. 

European Literature Night is based on the premise of literature being a unique creative tool reflecting the elementary dialogue between single voices and cultures who share the same reading experience. Literature is the tool of mutual understanding, cultural exchange helping to break down communication barriers.

The European Literature Night event at the British Library is organised by EUNIC London with the coordination of the Czech Centre London. It will showcase six of the finest European talents, chaired by Rosie Goldsmiths, and short extracts will be read by each author followed by a Q & A session afterwards.

The Hungarian writer Noémi Szécsi has been invited out of fifty nominations to join the panel of writers. The Balassi Institute Hungarian Cultural Centre London is proud to support her participation in this prestigious event. Her book Finnugor vámpír will be published in English by Stork Press later this year. The novel follows a young vampire returning from England to Budapest who does not want to suck blood but has literary ambitions. Her young-looking Grandmother seriously objects to this. The short, two-part novel is a parody of Künstlerroman, Bildungsroman and literary vampire traditions.

In 2000 Noémi studied cultural anthropology and gender studies at the Christina Institute in Helsinki. She wrote her first novel, Finno-Ugrian Vampire there. The script which was based on the novel participated the Sundance Scriptwriters' Workshop in Prague in November 2001.

Noémi Szécsi was born in 1976 in Szentes, Hungary. Her second novel, The Communist Monte Cristo was awarded the European Union Prize For Literature in 2009. In the same year she published a novel about present-day anarchists under the title of Last Centaur. In 2011 she received the prestigious József Attlia Award for literary achievement. Her most recent novel, The Restless is published by Európa Publishing House.

Tickets: £6 (£4)

Booking: 019 3754 6546

Further information: www.bl.uk, www.szecsinoemi.hu, http://storkpress.co.uk, www.eunic-london.org

Tuesday 15 May, 7pm
Waterstones Hampstead
68-69 Hampstead High Street
NW3 1QP London

Eastern European Outsiders: Ognjen Spahić and Noémi Szécsi, chaired by A.M. Bakalar 

Award-winning authors Ognjen Spahić (Montenegro) and Noémi Szécsi (Hungary), in a joint event organised by Istros Books and Stork Press, talk about the power behind their gripping narratives which explore the construction of identity and how unlikely settings can illuminate our understanding of the world.

Ognjen Spahić's Hansen's Children won the 2005 Meša Selimović Prize and 2011 Ovid Festival Prize. Noémi Szécsi is the 2009 winner of European Union Prize for Literature. Her first novel, The Finno-Ugrian Vampire, was voted Best Book in Hungary in 2011. Both authors have been selected for the European Literature Night, event at the British Library. A.M. Bakalar is a Polish-born author of Madame Mephisto and first Polish woman to publish a novel in English in the UK since Poland joined EU in 2004. 

Tel: 0207 794 1098

Tickets £3 - redeemable against the purchase of Hansen's Children or Madame Mephisto.
Refreshments provided. 
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More information: http://storkpress.co.uk/noemiszecsi.html, www.ambakalar.com

Tuesday 28 February, 7pm
Hungarian Cultural Centre
10 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London WC2E 7NA

Book Launch
Ágnes Lehóczky Rememberer (Eggbox Publishing, 2012)

Ágnes Lehóczky's second English language collection consists of five sequences of prose poems exploring memory, place and the retreats of language. Playful, intelligent and built from words that pulsate with energetic reference and invention, her poems are concerned with how one deals with recollections encountered in a new tongue and how this process can turn against itself.

Ágnes Lehóczky is an Hungarian-born poet and translator. She completed her Masters in English and Hungarian Literature at Pázmány Péter University of Hungary in 2001 and an MA with distinction in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2006. She holds a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing, also from the UEA. She has two short poetry collections in Hungarian, Station X (2000) and Medallion (2002), published by Universitas, Hungary. Her first full collection, Budapest to Babel, was published by Egg Box in 2008. She was the winner of the Daniil Pashkoff Prize 2010 in poetry and the inaugural winner of the Jane Martin Prize for Poetry at Girton College, Cambridge, in 2011.

Her collection of essays on the poetry of Ágnes Nemes Nagy, Poetry, the Geometry of Living Substance, was published in 2011 by Cambridge Scholars and a libretto of hers was commissioned by Writers' Centre Norwich for The Voice Project at Norwich Cathedral as part of & Norfolk and Norwich Festival 2011. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Sheffield.

George Szirtes, the highly acclaimed Hungarian-born English poet and translator and Nathan Hamilton, poet and direcor of Egg Box Publishing will be in converstation with the author.

Free. For reservations please call 020 7240 6162 or email us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

We kindly ask all registered guests to let us know if they cannot attend the event at least the day before.