Anna Bentley was born and educated in Britain. While doing her teacher training at Oxford, she met her Hungarian husband and, consequently, the Hungarian language. She taught English before moving to Budapest where she has lived since 2000. Pushkin Children’s Press (UK) published Anna’s translation of Ervin Lázár's children's classic Arnica, the Duck Princess in 2019. In the same year, her translation of Anna Menyhért’s Women's Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Women Writers, was published by Brill. She is currently working on Zoltán Halasi’s Road to the Empty Sky.
Photograph © Anna Bentley
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The inhabitants of this plague-struck world, in this poem by Hungarian poet Petra Szőcs, are seething with suspicion, horror, fear, and longing.
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“So, when I write, I should / keep your commandment—but how?” a poem by Hungarian poet Zsófia Balla, in Anna Bentley’s translation.
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