This event will focus on negotiating multiple belongings – in terms of transcending places, languages and allegiances, and will reflect on ways in which creative practice enriches academic careers. The conversation will include reflections on the recent English translation of Tompa’s novel Home, recently published by Istros Books in Komporaly’s translation. http://istrosbooks.com/product/home/

Organised by the Centre for the Study of Media and Culture in Small Nations.

Andrea Tompa (born 1971) is a multi-award-winning Hungarian novelist and theatre critic, former editor of Színház/Theatre magazine and a member of the prestigious Széchenyi Literary and Arts Academy. She is also a widely published academic, based in the Hungarian Theatre Department at Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania. Tompa is author of the novels A hóhér háza/The Hangman’s House (translated into English by Bernard Adams, Seagull Books, 2021 – shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize), Fejtől és lábtól/Top to Tail (2013), Omerta (2017, translated into German by Terezia Mora, Suhrkamp, 2022 and into English by Bernard Adams, Seagull Books, forthcoming 2024), Haza/Home (2020, translated by Jozefina Komporaly, Istros Books, 2024) and Sokszor nem halunk meg/Often We Don’t Die (2023). She lives and works in Budapest. Tompa is among the authors invited for the European Literature Festival taking place at the British Library, 18-19 May, 2024. http://europe.org.uk/magazine/european-writers-festival-2-programme-and-presenters/

Jozefina Komporaly is a London-based academic and translator from Hungarian and Romanian. She is editor and co-translator of the collections How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients and Other Plays (Seagull, 2015), András Visky’s Barrack Dramaturgy (Intellect, 2017) and Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion (Bloomsbury, 2021), and author of numerous publications on translation, adaptation and theatre including Radical Revival as Adaptation (Palgrave, 2017). Her translations appeared in Asymptote, The Baffler, Columbia Journal, Los Angeles Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Words without Borders, World Literature Today, and were produced by Foreign Affairs, Trap Door, Theatre Y, Trafika Europe. Recent publications include Mr K Released by Matéi Visniec (finalist for the 2021 EBRD Literature Prize), Story of a Stammer by Gábor Vida (Seagull Books, 2022), MyLifeandMyLife by Melinda Mátyus (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023). Her translation Home by Andrea Tompa (Istros Books, 2024) was the recipient of a PEN Translates Grant. She is a member of the UK Translators Association. Website: https://jozefinakomporaly.com/

Márta Minier is Associate Professor of Theatre and Media Drama at the University of South Wales and co-director of the Centre for the Study of Media and Culture in Small Nations. Her research interests span adaptation, translation, dramaturgy, Shakespeare (the reworkings of Shakespeare in particular), the biopic and biographical drama, and the cultures of East-Central Europe. Her publications include the co-edited Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic (2014, Ashgate), Shakespeare and Tourism: Place, Memory, Participation (2019, E.S.I.), Hamlet Translations: Prisms of Cultural Encounters across the Globe (2021, Legenda) as well as special issues for New Readings (2012), Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance (2017), and Textus (2018). Her latest co-edited volume entitled Local/Global Shakespeare and Advertising (Routledge) is due to come out this year. Márta is also joint editor of the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance.