George Gomori

He is a regular contributor to British newspaper The Guardian and to The Times Literary Supplement.

George Gomori studied at Eötvös Loránd University and University of Oxford. The recorded working language is Hungarian. Distinctions recorded are Alföld Prize, Salvatore Quasimodo Memorial Award, Officer's Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit and Medal of the National Education Commission.

• Name — George Gomori • Born — 3 April 1934 • Language — Hungarian • Genre — Poetry

Gomori was born in Budapest in 1934. From 1953 to 1956 he studied Hungarian and Polish at Eötvös Loránd University. He took part in the 1956 revolution both as a student organiser and editor of the newspaper Egyetemi ifjúság (University Youth). After the suppression of the revolution he fled to England and continued his studies at the University of Oxford where in 1962 completed a B.Litt. thesis on Polish and Hungarian literature later published as his first book in English (Polish and Hungarian Poetry 1945 to 1956; Oxford, 1966). Between 1958 and 1961 he was member of the Executive of the Hungarian Writers Association Abroad.

His first teaching job was at the University of California, Berkeley, after which he researched at Harvard University (1964–65). Having spent four years as researcher and librarian at the University of Birmingham, in 1969 he took up a position at the University of Cambridge teaching Polish and Hungarian literature until his retirement in 2001. In May 2017 he was appointed as Senior Research Associate of the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies.

Gömöri is a regular contributor to the British press (The Guardian, The Independent) as well as to the American bimonthly World Literature Today. Several essays of his were published in Polish publication Odra Wrocław. He also continues publishing in Hungarian, English and Polish. His reminiscences of Czesław Miłosz were included in Cynthia L. Haven's An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz in 2011. He is also a member of Trinity College, Cambridge and emeritus fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge, where for a number of years edited the college newsletter. For over three decades he has been on the editorial board of the American quarterly Books Abroad and its continuation World Literature Today. He is also on the editorial board of Lymbus Budapest and Litteraria Copernicana Toruń. 2014 saw a new book of his poetry published, Rózsalovaglás (Riding with Roses), by Pro Pannonia Publishers and his collected essays on the late Renaissance poet Bálint Balassi (A rejtőzködő Balassi) published in Hungarian by Komp-Press in Romania. His latest poetry collection in English, Polishing October: New and Selected Poems (Shoestring Press) was recently reviewed in World Literature Today.

He has two daughters from his first marriage, Beata and Anna, and with his second wife Mari has brought up three sons, Daniel, Peter and Ben. The neo-classical and modernist Hungarian painter and engraver, Jenő Medveczky was his step-father.