Monika Reneé Hoffman (11 March 1982) is a Swedish-Hungarian singer and songwriter from

Malmö Malmö (, ; da, Malmø ) is the largest city in the Swedish county (län) of Scania (Skåne). It is the third-largest city in Sweden, after Stockholm and Gothenburg, and the sixth-largest city in the Nordic region, with a municipal populat ...

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...

Monika Hoffman's was born in Malmö. Her father is Swedish and her mother is Hungarian, so she grew up speaking fluent Hungarian, Swedish, and English. At the age of three she began playing the

violin The violin, sometimes known as a ''fiddle'', is a wooden chordophone (string instrument) in the violin family. Most violins have a hollow wooden body. It is the smallest and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in the family in regular ...

and later on she also began playing the

piano The piano is a stringed keyboard instrument in which the strings are struck by wooden hammers that are coated with a softer material (modern hammers are covered with dense wool felt; some early pianos used leather). It is played using a keyboa ...

and the

saxophone The saxophone (often referred to colloquially as the sax) is a type of single-reed woodwind instrument with a conical body, usually made of brass. As with all single-reed instruments, sound is produced when a reed on a mouthpiece vibrates to pr ...

. As a child and teenager, she went to various music schools and later went on to study at

Berklee College of Music Berklee College of Music is a private music college in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the largest independent college of contemporary music in the world. Known for the study of jazz and modern American music, it also offers college-level cours ...

. She was granted the Berklee College of Music World Tour Scholarship and got the opportunity to share the stage with people like

Michael Brecker Michael Leonard Brecker (March 29, 1949 – January 13, 2007) was an American jazz saxophonist and composer. He was awarded 15 Grammy Awards as both performer and composer. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Berklee College of M ...

and Charlie Hayden. In 2005, she auditioned for the Hungarian Megasztar (Idol) and was selected to be part of the final 12. In spite of only placing ninth overall, she became one of the most popular and successful contestants from that season, kickstarting her career as a singer in Hungary. It resulted in two studio albums, the pop oriented "Én vagyok a nő" (I'm the woman), followed by the jazz album "Monika Hoffman And The Scandinavian Knights". The latter one featured one of Hungary’s best jazz-pianists, Róbert Lakatos. Monika Hoffman has twice competed in the Hungarian preselection for the

Eurovision Song Contest The Eurovision Song Contest (), sometimes abbreviated to ESC and often known simply as Eurovision, is an international songwriting competition organised annually by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), featuring participants representing pr ...

. In 2008 with the song "Légy te az első" and in 2013 with the song "Hullócsillag".

Discography

Studio albums

*Én vagyok a nö *Monika Hoffman And The Scandinavian Knights *Let's Run Away featuring Paquito D'Rivera *Snowbound

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hoffman, Monika Swedish pop singers Swedish people of Hungarian descent Swedish composers 21st-century Hungarian women singers Hungarian pop singers Hungarian people of Swedish descent Hungarian composers Living people Singers from Malmö 1982 births 21st-century Swedish women singers