Edina Szvoren: Short prose
– Hungary
Born in 1974, Edina Szvoren is a teacher of music theory and musical notation at Béla Bartók Secondary School of Music, where she once studied herself. She studied musical conducting at Ferenc Liszt University. In 2010, she published her first novella collection titled Pertu and received the EU Prize for Literature in 2015 for her book Nincs, és ne is legyen (There Is None, Nor Let There Be). Edina Szvoren is most interested in the topic of family and the impossibility and illusion of a familial existence. Her stories often feature pain, incompleteness and distortion as their central themes. She doesn’t write stories, but depicts states that initially seem hopelessly unchangeable. Her texts feature a perfectly formed and well-thought out structure. She admits that she as a reader and as a writer looks for a challenge in prose that includes various shifts in views and narration. She explains: “Short stories are by necessity more expressive and more impulsive than novels. If I may reach for a musical analogy, it’s like a canon – every single voice is related to something, imitating something, nothing is off topic.”