Tibor Fischer (born 15 November 1959) is a British novelist and short story writer. In 1993, he was selected by the literary magazine Granta as one of the 20 best young British writers while his novel Under the Frog was featured on the Booker Prize shortlist.
Fischer's parents were Hungarian basketball players, who fled Hungary in 1956; first his father, György Fischer, and then his mother, the captain of the women's national basketball team. Tibor's father studied economics at Manchester University, [1] started work in the Hungarian section of the BBC taking the name "George Fischer," and ended up as Radio Four's head of talks and documentaries. [2]
Tibor Fischer was born in Stockport, England and grew up in Bromley, Kent, where he attended the local comprehensive school. He studied Latin and French at Peterhouse, Cambridge. [3]
The 1956 revolution, and his father's background, informed Fischer's debut novel Under the Frog , about a Hungarian basketball team in the first years of Communism in Hungary. The title is derived from a Hungarian saying, that the worst possible place to be is "under a frog's arse down a coal mine." [4]
In 1992, the novel won a Betty Trask Prize for literature, and was the first debut novel to be shortlisted for the Booker prize. [3]
Fischer's subsequent novels include The Thought Gang , about a delinquent and alcoholic philosophy professor who hooks up with a failed one-armed bandit in France to form a successful team of bank robbers, and The Collector Collector , about a weekend in South London, narrated by a 5000-year-old Sumerian pot. Voyage to the End of the Room was published in 2003, and concerned an agoraphobic ex-dancer.
Good to be God was published by Alma Books on 4 September 2008. In it a broke, unemployed, "habitual failure" uses his friend's credit card to start a new life in Florida where he decides that the fastest way to make a fortune would be to start a religion. [4]
Fischer, in 2000, published a short story collection entitled Don't Read This Book If You're Stupid, published in the U.S. as I Like Being Killed: Stories.
In 2009, Fischer became the Royal Literary Fund writing fellow at City and Guilds of London Art School. [5] [6]
In April 2017, Fischer wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian where he defended Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán's government against charges of authoritarianism and "antisemitism." [7] In the same context, he rejected notions of the government going after the George Soros funded Central European University, arguing that the relevant and controversial amendment to the law on higher education affects some 28 foreign institutions, 27 of which were found to be operating with “irregularities” ("largely sloppy paperwork, something that will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with university admin") and that none has been fined or shut down. Fischer posits that the CEU "is not being singled out for punishment" but "asking to be given privileged treatment." [7]
In response to it, the newspaper received letters from CEU president Michael Ignatieff, Brian Dooley, of Human Rights First, and others, who expressed their opposition to Fischer's views, [8] arguing that the amendment requires the operation of a campus in CEU's country of origin, something that "would effectively make it impossible for CEU to operate in Hungary," and denying that the university has sought "special privileges." [8]
The Booker Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Booker–McConnell Prize (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel written in the English language and published in the United Kingdom. The winner of the Booker Prize is generally assured international renown and success; therefore, the prize is of great significance for the book trade. From its inception, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014 it was widened to any English-language novel—a change that proved controversial.
Central European University (CEU) is a private research university accredited in Austria, Hungary, and the United States, with campuses in Vienna and Budapest. The university is known for its academic rigour and reputation, focus on the social sciences and humanities, research-intensive environment, and international student body. A central tenet of the university's mission is the promotion of open societies, as a result of its close association with the Open Society Foundations. CEU is one of eight members comprising the CIVICA Alliance, along with Sciences Po, the London School of Economics, and the European University Institute, among others.
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Under the Frog is British-born Hungarian writer Tibor Fischer's debut novel, it was published in 1992. The book was a winner of the 1992 Betty Trask Award and was the first debut novel to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
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The Collector Collector is the third novel by British author Tibor Fischer first published in 1997, by Secker and Warburg in the UK and Henry Holt in the US. It has also been published in Canada and Germany. Mixed reviews appeared in many notable publications both in the UK and US, for example The Guardian, The New Statesman, The New York Times, The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement, there being admiration for Fischer's wit and wordplay but a feeling that it lacked a real story. The novel also has been identified as one of the best of the 1990s.
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Diana Omo Evans is a British novelist, journalist and critic who was born and lives in London. Evans has written three full-length novels. Her first novel, 26a, published in 2005, won the Orange Award for New Writers, the Betty Trask Award and the deciBel Writer of the Year award. Her third novel Ordinary People was shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature.
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