Levente Csender: On the deepest poverty
– Hungary
Born in Transylvania in 1977, Levente Csender has lived in Budapest since his 14 years of age. He studied communication and the Hungarian language and literature at Pázmány Péter Catholic University. In 2006, he published the collection Szűnőföldem (My Dying/Native Country), which according to one critic “constitutes a single long sentence about moving from a village to a city, from rural poverty to post-industrial misery, from the agrarian form of life to urban lowlife, from a minority to a large, damned nothing.”In the collection Fordított zuhanás (Inverse Fall, 2010), he draws on the experiences from central-eastern European revolutions and the two decades that followed (in Hungary and in Romania). He also asks the question of how free a person can really be in a post-communist country. Stories from the collection Egyszer majd el kell mondani (It Will Have to Be Said One Day, 2015) deal with the period from the 1980s in Romania to the 2010s in Budapest and show a grotesque picture of those leaving their native country, as well as those looking for their place therein. His latest work is a collection of fairy-tales titled A különleges Meditittimó kalandjai (The Adventures of Special Meditittimo, 2019). The main character is inspired by the author’s ten-year-old autistic son and the book can serve as a fairy-tale guide to the world as experienced by people with autism. The book was illustrated by Enikő Szalontai, the author’s wife.