György Dragomán was born in Marosvásárhely, Transylvania in 1973 and moved to Hungary when he was fifteen. The White King was first published in its original Hungarian in 2005 where it won prizes and is now an iconic bestseller. It is now published in over thirty languages and has been made into a highly acclaimed English-language film. Dragoman works as a translator: among the works he has translated into Hungarian are short stories, essays and texts by James Joyce, I. B. Singer, Neil Jordan and Ian McEwan. The two most difficult novels he has ever translated are Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting and Samuel Beckett's Watt. He lives in Budapest with his family. Paul Olchváry has translated many books for leading publishers, including György Dragomán's The White King, András Forgách's No Live Files Remain, Ádám Bodor's The Sinistra Zone, Vilmos Kondor's Budapest Noir and Károly Pap's Azarel. He has received translation awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, and Hungary's Milán Füst Foundation. His shorter translations have appeared in the Paris Review, New York Times Magazine, Kenyon Review, Tablet, AGNI and Guernica. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

"It's the Just William books teamed up with Nineteen Eighty-Four; a superb novel about childhood, schooldays and gang fights...Dragoman lets the narrative rip, shifting the characters around like he's Stephen King or Elmore Leonard...sums up the lunacy of Ceausescu's regime better than anything else I've read." -- Tibor Fischer Guardian "Dragoman is superb at the paraphernalia of boyhood...so much intense experience is on offer...a poignant and big-hearted book, firing the imagination long after the pages have stopped turning" -- Charles Fernyhough Sunday Telegraph "A most impressive debut" -- Paul Bailey Independent "Electric, ominous, urgent...a coming of age tale with a difference" Daily Mail "Sprawling, urgent, spilling with detail...at once charming and disturbing'" Financial Times