Bernard Adams

Bernard Adams was born in 1937 and read Hungarian and Russian at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He took early retirement in 1991, intending to devote himself to translating Hungarian literature. He began his translation career in 1997 with Zsigmond Móricz's Relations and has since published more than 25 translations, ranging from the eighteenth-century Kelemen Mikes's Letters from Turkey to Dezső Kosztolányi's Kornél Esti of the 1930s. He moved to Hungary in 2006, since when he has been awarded two PEN American Center translation fund awards, two second places in the UK John Dryden translation competition, and two translation awards from the Füst Milán Foundation of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He lives in Zánka, a village on the north shore of Lake Balaton in western Hungary.