László Ladányi

László Ladányi was born in 1907 in Budapest

László Ladányi was born in Budapest in 1907. He finished high school at the Budapest Academy of Commerce in 1925. His first poem appeared in 1923, and his poems later ran often in Budapest periodicals.

His first book of poems came out in 1940. That year, as a Jew, he was taken into the Hungarian labor service, and he married Edit Utassy during a one-day leave in 1943. At the end of 1944 he escaped from his company in Romania and hid in villages, and after the war he learned that his parents had been murdered.

In 1945 he joined the new Hungarian Writers' Association and published poems, plays and children's stories. A rhymed play of his in 3 acts was staged in Budapest in 1953, and many of his works were broadcast on radio. After the 1956 revolution he moved to Israel in May 1957 with his wife and daughter.

In Israel he first worked as a photographer, and from 1967 to 1977 he was a technical draftsman at the Ministry of Communications. He turned to short stories and short novels in Hungarian and covered the Eichmann trial in 1961 for a Hungarian émigré paper. He won the Herzl Prize in 1971 and the Nordau Prize in 1975, and he died in Tel Aviv in 1992.