Ágota Bozai (born 1965,

Siófok Siófok (; ; ) is a town in Somogy County, Hungary on the southern bank of Lake Balaton. It is the Somogy County#Municipalities, second largest municipality in Somogy County and the seat of Siófok District. It covers an area of about between Lak ...

) is a Hungarian journalist and novelist. She has written eight novels in Hungarian, and for her doctoral degree, translated James Joyce's '' Finnegan's Wake'' into Hungarian.

Life

Bozai was born in

Hungary Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and ...

in 1965. She holds an MA degree in

philology Philology () is the study of language in Oral tradition, oral and writing, written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology. Philology is also de ...

from the

University of Kolozsvár A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Univ ...

Cluj-Napoca Cluj-Napoca ( ; ), or simply Cluj ( , ), is a city in northwestern Romania. It is the second-most populous city in the country and the seat of Cluj County. Geographically, it is roughly equidistant from Bucharest (), Budapest () and Belgrade ( ...

. She has a PhD in English Literature, and her thesis was on her translation of James Joyce's ''Finnegan's Wake''. She works as a journalist as well as a novelist and teacher.

Work

Bozai is a literary translator of English books (fiction and non-fiction) for various Hungarian publishers. She has written eight novels of her own in Hungarian. Her first novel, ''Persian Divan,'' was an autobiographical account of her unhappy marriage to an Iranian student she met at university. Bozai's first novel was described as a "satirical account of what happened in the east European Countries when ‘at-all-costs capitalism’ sprung up from the ashes of the previously Soviet-controlled governments." Her later novels include ''Tranzit glória'' (1999; published in German as ''Err is goettlich'' in 2001 and in English as ''To Err is Divine'' in 2004, translated by David Kramer), ''Mi az ábra?'' (''What's Up?'' 2003) and ''A szerelmetlen város'' (''A Loveless Little Town'', 2004). Bozai's second novel ''To Err is Divine'' describes a middle-aged teacher, Anna Levay, who is an atheist but develops miraculous powers. Philip Landon stated in the ''Washington Post Book World'' that Bozai "satirizes the grotesque opportunism of the 1990s, when former lackeys of the communist regime discovered the joys of capitalism." It has also been described as "a satirical narrative worthy of Swift". The novel was a bestseller in Hungary and Germany before being published in English in 2004.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bozai, Agota 1965 births Living people 21st-century Hungarian women writers Hungarian translators Hungarian expatriates in Romania People from Siófok English–Hungarian translators