Peter Zavada

Born 1982 in Budapest/Hungary.

Peter Závada is a poet and playwright. He holds degrees in English and Italian from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest (2003–2009) and in theatre studies from the Károli Gáspár University (2013–2015). He is currently a Phd student in ELTE’s Aesthetics Doctoral Program (since 2016).

For the past decade he has worked as a poet, dramaturg, and playwright. His plays have been performed in theatres in Budapest such as Katona József, Örkény, Radnóti, Víg, Belvárosi, and Trafó.

In February 2018, Závada took part in creating the performance text for Andrei Şerban’s Richard III at Radnóti Theatre. In August 2018, he was a resident in a monthlong fellowship, and had a poetry reading at Literarisches Colloquium Berlin/Germany. In 2019, he featured in the German poetry anthology for Hungarian poets entitled Dies wird die Hypnose des Jahrhunderts – Ungarische Lyrik der Gegenwart (This will be the Hypnosis of the Century), edited by Oroslya Kalász and Peter Holland. In June 2019, he participated at the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam/Netherlands. In September 2019, he wrote the performance text of the highly successful play Kertész street Shaxpeare-carwash staged by internationally acclaimed director Viktor Bodó at Örkény Színház in Budapest.

In 2017, he received the Móricz Zsigmond Literary Scholarship and the Péter Horváth Literary Scholarship. In 2018 he was awarded the Ernő Szép Prize for Playwrights.

Peter Závada has been publishing poems since 2009, in such Hungarian literary journals as Jelenkor, Élet és Irodalom, and Alföld. His first collection of poems, Ahol Megszakad, was published by Libri in Budapest in 2012, followed by Mész in 2015, and Roncs szélárnyékban in 2017.