Gábor Schein: Processes in microfibres
– Hungary
Born in 1969, Gábor Schein is an author, poet, translator, literary historian and a lecturer at the Department of Modern Hungarian Literature at ELTE in Budapest. A recurrent topic in his texts, which include literary history studies, as well as many novels, poems, short stories, dramas, essays and journalistic texts, is the attempt to capture and process people’s individual and collective traumas. “The most important events have always been captured in poems, which are my literary mother tongue. There are poets who write their entire life’s work in a single unified language or a fairly unchanging manner of expression, but for me any new poetry collection bites its tongue off and when it is complete, I find myself unable to speak,” he said in an interview.
His latest work Megleszünk itt (We’ll Survive) seeks an answer to the question of what people should do with their lives, what separates and what connects individuals who are neighbours, yet they’re alienated from each other in their existence. The story is based on the life’s journey of a Swiss professor of mathematics who starts an armed rebellion when his house is to be repossessed. “I am very interested in these maladjusted protagonists, the severability of human relationships between men and women, parents and children and among co-workers,” explains Schein.