Magda Szabó

Born in Debrecen in 1917, Szabó studied Latin and Hungarian literature before working as a teacher and beginning her career as a poet. On the very day in 1949 she was awarded Hungary's prestigious Baumgarten Prize, the newly installed Communist government rescinded it and dismissed her from her Ministry post, judging her bourgeois, Christian-humanist background politically unfit.

Blacklisted from publishing for nearly a decade, she supported herself teaching in elementary schools and wrote in private until the political climate eased in the late 1950s, when she turned to the novels (Abigail, Iza's Ballad, and eventually The Door) that made her Hungary's most celebrated postwar writer.

The Door drew directly on her own decades-long relationship with her real-life housekeeper. Szabó died in 2007 at ninety, and it was only after her death that The Door reached its widest international audience, becoming a bestseller in English translation years later.