Abstract
‘I engage in politics so that I can write freely and we can develop peacefully without political interference,’ says Hungary's well-known writer
Gyorgy Konrad's latest book Anti Politics has been welcomed by E. P. Thompson as ‘a book of exceptional importance’. It has reinforced the international acclaim won by his earlier works, but has also accentuated his position at the forefront of dissident politics in his native Hungary. Yet Konrad is a writer who thinks politics is like a contagious infection, something to get rid of. Elizabeth Heron went to Budapest to find out how a writer survives on the Cold War frontier.