Attila Varga, journalist
Attila Varga, journalist, was born in Debrecen in 1969, to a family of teachers.
Having acquired his qualifications in toolmaking, he worked as a locksmith in factory maintenance, as storage staff, as a goods packer for trading companies, as a waiter in a hotel and as a manager of a printing press.
His first writings were suspected of being written by his educated relatives, and one of his factory bosses responded to a writing of his published in a Debrecen newspaper with the following words: “Attila, if you end up as a journalist, I’ll eat my hat.” Attila Varga then passed his secondary final exams, finished at the György Bálint School of Journalism with flying colours and earned a degree in Social Pedagogy at the University of Debrecen. In the meantime, he was holding a position as a columnist in Nyíregyháza and Debrecen in 1995, and he came to the spotlight of the attention of his fellow-journalists with an interview series for Playboy conducted with Bohumil Hrabal, the renowned Czech novelist living in solitary seclusion near Prague.
He moved to Budapest, and from 1999 until 2019, he was active as a columnist and editor of the daily newspaper Magyar Nemzet. He is currently working for the Pulitzer Memorial Award-winning weekly paper, Szabad Föld as a senior journalist. He has got eight of his books published in Hungarian, and has been awarded numerous prestigious professional decorations, such as the Golden Quill Prize of Magyar Nemzet, Award for Quality Journalism and the Sándor Petőfi Press Freedom Prize, Táncsics Mihály Prize. In 2019, he was acknowledged with the Hungarian Gold Cross of Merit for “his writings vividly depicting social tensions and unique destinies”.
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