GYÖRGY DALOS - AWARD WINNER 2010

Born 1943 in Budapest (Hungary)
lives in Berlin (Germany)

György Dalos receives the Leipzig Book Award for European
Understanding for “Der Vorhang geht auf. Das Ende der Diktaturen in Osteuropa”. His subtly differentiated account of the historical processes that led to the implosion of the communist apparatuses of power in Poland, Hungary, the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania fascinates in its commanding factual knowledge, its awareness of the telling detail and the confident reliability of its opinion. With reflective caution and disp assionate irony, Dalos reveals the main directions and the human dimension of the epoch-making change, the policy of the “fraternal states”, the dependences of the rulers, the protagonists of the opposition, the dynamics of the mass uprising – and finally too, the heavy burden of the legacies which the post-’89 societies have had to deal with.
The award honours a dedicated democrat. As a novelist, historian and essayist, György Dalos gives a voice to the idea of European understanding and serves it quite outstandingly as an intermediate.

Accolade: Lerke von Saalfeld, literary critic (Germany)

Lerke von Saalfeld: Accolade for György Dalos (PDF 33 kB)

György Dalos: Acceptance speech (PDF 29 kB)

Biography (PDF 18 kB)