The Budapest Bardroom

The Bardroom has decided the best way to celebrate the Bard’s birthday would be to promote the works of Budapest’s own local talent, and so we’re staging the All-Local show featuring two of Budapest most established English writers. As usual, the show will be held at Treehugger Dan’s Used Book Shop at its new location behind the Opera, Lázár u. 16. VI. District, 7:30pm Wednesday April 23.

The show will feature readings from John Nadler’s Searching for Sofia, a non-fiction work set in aftermath of the Kosovo War. To provide some poetry to complement the fiction, we’ve invited back Gabor Gyukics, who performed at some of the very earliest Bardrooms eight years ago. We’re also pleased to welcome Irish songwriter and guitarist Jude Shiels, who is releasing his self titled debut solo record this summer.

As always, the audience can expect mind-numbing quiz questions and a ferociously competetive poetry-writing competition all of which will be rewarded with exquisite prizes.

Eight local artists, both ex-pats and Hungarians, have banded together to form the Sörrealism group, and are holding their collective show at the café of the arthouse cinema Palace Kossuth 4, Vaci út 14. The show runs from February 7- March 6, and on February 27, the group will have a gathering at the theater at 7pm, offering a chance to meet the artists.

The event will feature beer discounts (obviously), and since it’s cheap night at the Kossuth, folks can stay on to see one of their artsy movies, like the critically acclaimed Atonement or The Kite Runner.

The Sörrealist Show features eighteen paintings by Alex Ferenczi, Marcus Goldson, Leah Kohlenberg, Lado Pochkhua, Wayne Brett, Bullet Shih, Barbara Sipos, and video work by Paula Brett. The group coalesced around the belief that non-figurative art had largely exhausted its possibilities and a return to representation was inevitable. The word Sör-Realism, using the Hungarian word for beer, had been used by the Pestaside Writers’ Group for years to describe their literary style.

The term now lends itself to the Sörrealist Artists’ Movement, whose manifesto declares that abstraction is a tool for representation and not an end in itself. The group, as mentioned is a cosmopolitan multi-national one, with the artists drawing commonality from the city of Budapest itself.

What better day for a shotgun wedding between two of the stalwarts of Budapest’s writer scene: the Bardroom’s Valentines Day show will serve as launching pad for the long-awaited new issue of Pilvax magazine. And to make it even kinkier, it’s a sort of literary three-some since the show will be held at Tree-Hugger Dan’s Used Book Shop at its new 2nd location behind the Opera, Lázár u. 16. VI. District, 7:30pm Thursday February 14.

The show will feature readings from two of the contributers to this, the fifth edition of Pilvax. A fiction work by Munich-based American Errol Scott will read by resident impresario Mike Leskai, and up and coming Croatian Nikola Tutek will present his non-fiction piece about Budapest. Furthermore, local celebrity author Adam LeBor will present selections from his long-anticpated WWII thriller Night Hotel.

As always, the audience can expect mind-numbing quiz questions and a ferociously competetive poetry-writing competition all of which will be rewarded with equisite prizes. The evening culminates with a throbbing After-Party starting at 22:30 at the über-underground Vittula (Kértész u. 4, District VII) with music by DJ Sorin Pop.

Budapest’s premier English-language literary event, the Bardroom, is pleased to announce the Neil³ show. Featuring three different guys with the name Neil (although not all with the same spelling), this spectacularly alliterative event will take place at 7:30 pm on Sunday December 2, at Treehugger Dan’s new premises (located within the Yellow Zebra at Lázár utca 16 in the VI. District, right behind the Opera).

Watch this space for details.

Long-time Budapest author, Adam LeBor will be reading from his new book on
the tumultuous 20th Century in the city of Jaffa at the Bardroom, Budapest’s
long running series of performance poetry, fiction, and music. LeBor will be
headlining the Fall Show which is on Sunday October 14. The venue will be
the familiar Nyitott Műhely on Rath György u. 4 (Metro to Déli pu.) starting
at 7:30pm.

LeBor has written six books including Hitler’s Secret Bankers, an
investigation into Swiss economic collaboration with the Nazis; Milosevic: A
Biography, now regarded as the standard work on the life of the Serbian
dictator; and Complicity with Evil: the United Nations in the Age of Modern
Genocide, an investigation into the UN’s failures in Rwanda, Bosnia and
Darfur. On Sunday, he is reading from City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in
Jaffa, which tells the story of six families in the ancient port city: three
Jewish and three Arab. Published by Bloomsbury in Britain and WW Norton in
the US, it was short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize in
Britain.

In addition, the Bardroom will be welcoming Marc Nasdor back to Hungary. He
first traveled here in 1986, when he arrived with Allen Ginsberg to do
recordings of some 50 Hungarian poets back when he was co-director of the
Committee for International Poetry. This year he’ll release his first new
volume of poetry in 14 years: Sonnetailia, which will be published by Roof
Books in New York.

In keeping with tradition, audience members will be thrilled with exotic
prizes and mind-bending quiz questions. There will also be a few open mike
spots for those hoping to make their splash on the Budapest literary scene.