Ilka Papp-Zakor
I was born in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and it was also there that I learned to read and write.
I wrote my first text when I was four – it was a lullaby for a mouse.
And I liked writing.
I was lucky enough to get my writing published in a magazine written for and by children. And I liked having it published.
It was then that I realized what I wanted to do in my life was to write.
About ten years later I switched from poetry to prose. In the meantime I also got interested in biology and started to dream about becoming an ethologist, but finally I decided to study philology and become a Slavist.
I studied Russian and Hungarian philology in Cluj-Napoca, then moved to Warsaw and attended Czech and Slovak language courses at the University of Warsaw. Then I studied some more Russian in Cracow at the Jagiellonian University, where I attended also courses on Polish literature.
Then I finally received an MA degree in Hungarian literature for a comparative study about Hungarian, Russian, Polish and Czech pop culture and I moved to Helsinki, where I learned Finnish and semi-officially attended biology courses at the university.
I also improved my rat training skills, and finally moved back to Central Europe, to Budapest. At the moment I am learning Hebrew and dreaming of moving to Israel.
Soma Gál (1992) was born in Keszthely. He moved to Budapest and studied Portuguese literature, grammatics and culture on Eötvös Loránd University. Also he was living and studying in Porto, Portugal for a semester. He’s a novelist, poet and editor, he published his first book this year with the title Sármesék (Tales of mud). He won prizes in several hungarian literature festivals and competitions. Many of hungarian literature magazins published his short stories before, such as Apokrif, Új Forrás, Forrás, Hévíz, Pannon Tükör, Irodalmi Jelen. Since 2012 he’s working for the literature magazin named Apokrif, initially as editors’ assistant, than PR person, and since January in 2015 he’s the editor of prose. Also he translate contemporary portuguese poets to hungarian.