Hungarian · 1917–2007
Magda Szabó was the most translated Hungarian writer of the twentieth century, and spent a decade of it forbidden to publish. The communist authorities withdrew a literary prize on the day she received it in 1949 and classified her as an enemy of the state; she taught school and wrote for the drawer until 1958. The Door (1987) is the novel that carried her name abroad. A writer hires an old woman named Emerence as her housekeeper, and the book becomes a twenty-year duel between them — over privacy, gratitude, faith, and the sealed door of Emerence's flat, which nobody has been permitted to enter. It ends in a betrayal the narrator commits out of love and can never repair. Claire Messud and Ali Smith both wrote about it as a book that had disturbed them for years. Szabó also wrote Abigail, a wartime boarding-school novel that Hungarians vote among their favourite books, and Iza's Ballad. She won the Prix Femina Étranger in 2003 and died in 2007 at ninety, with a book in her hands.