Gábor T. Szántó

The native form of this personal name is Szántó T. Gábor. This article uses the Western name order.
Gábor T. Szántó is a Hungarian novelist, poet, editor and essayist (Budapest, 1966— ).

Szántó lives in Budapest and belongs to the third generation of postwar Jewish Hungarian writers, who came of age after the period of silence about Jewishness characterizing the experience of their parents' generation. In his books he writes mostly about the life, assimilation, moral disagreement and generation gap of Central European Jews, tortured by Nazi and Communist dictatorships. He is also considering the pros and cons of the European Jewish rebirth.

Szántó has a degree in political science and jurisprudence from Eötvös Loránd University. He is the editor-in-chief of the Hungarian-Jewish cultural and political monthly Szombat, founded in 1989. Since 2008 he has been teaching Modern Jewish Literature in university and open university context.

He published his first volume of stories, A tizedik ember (The Tenth Man), in 1995. A volume of two novellas, Mószer (The Informer) appeared in 1997. Szántó has published a novel in 2003: Keleti pályadvar, végállomas[1] (Eastern Station, Last Stop)“. His second short story book Lágermikulás (The Crunch of Empty Boots)[2] was published in 2004 followed by a collection of poems A szabadulás íze (The Taste of Escape) in 2010. His novel, Édeshármas[3] (Threesome) appeared in May, 2012, and his new novel Kafka macskái [4](Kafka's Cats) in 2014.

His novella (Mószer) appeared in German as In Schuld verstrickt (Edition Q, 1999). A volume of short stories (Обратный билет – Obratnij Bilet) came out in Russian at Text Publisher, 2008. His short stories and essays have been translated to several languages. In 2003 one of his short stories was selected into the anthology Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary (University of Nebraska Press). In 2012 his poems were published in the anthology “I lived on this Earth...” Hungarian Poets on the Holocaust (Alba Press, London), and his writing was anthologized in the contemporary volume of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization (Yale University Press).

Gábor T. Szántó organized several conferences in Hungary about Jewish literature, art, theatre and film. In 2003 he was a participant at the Iowa International Writing Program.

One of his short stories (Homecoming) has been developed into a script and a feature film entitled 1945 directed by Hungarian film director Ferenc Török was shot in production Katapultfilm. Cameraman: Elemér Ragályi, music: Tibor Szemző. Screening is scheduled in US film festivals from January 2017.