The 67-year-old poet, prime minister Viktor Orbán’s chief cultural adviser, was coronavirus.

Coronavirus – the second wave

Half a year after the spring outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the second wave of the pandemic has arrived. The radical increase in the number of infected is forcing more and more countries to re-impose restrictions, despite the fact that the world economy has not even recovered from the effects of the spring outbreak. According to the posters, the second wave also reached Hungary. Follow our news!

We announce with deep pain and shock that the President of the Hungarian PEN Club, the poet Géza Szőcs, passed away tonight. Blessed be your memory!

With these words, the news of the death of Géza Szőcs was announced on Facebook by the PEN Club.

The 67-year-old former secretary of state and poet was coronavirus, about his serious condition, we wrote at the end of October:

Géza Szőcs Kossuth and József Attila, poet and politician winner of the Târgu Mureş Prize, born on August 21, 1953 in Târgu Mureş. He graduated from Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca in 1978 with a degree in Hungarian-Russian. In the early 1980s, he edited a samizdat newspaper in Transylvania, for which the Securitate arrested and abused him several times; It later turned out that his own father had also reported him.

He worked as a journalist in Geneva and at the Free Europe Radio office in Budapest, and later at the Hungarian Daily. After the regime change in Romania, he returned to Cluj-Napoca in 1990; here he also assumed a political role in addition to his journalistic and editorial work. Between 1990 and 1991 he was secretary general of the Hungarian Democratic Union of Romania (DAHR), between 1991 and 1993 he was its political vice president and between 1990 and 1992 he was elected senator. Between 1996 and 1998, he became a board member of the Hungarian Association for Civic Cooperation.

Between 1996 and 2000, he was a member of the supervisory board of the Hungária Television Public Foundation, which oversees Duna TV, and later, in 2008, he became a member of the board of directors delegated by Fidesz. From 2010 to 2012, he was Secretary of State for Culture in the Ministry of National Resources of the second Orbán government, and from 2012 he became Chief Cultural Advisor to the Prime Minister.

He worked as a senior staff member of the Literary Present and since 2011 is the President of the PEN Club of Hungary.

In 2012, when he resigned his post as Secretary of State for Culture, Szőcs listed Ferihegy Airport as Ferenc Liszt, achieving the goals of classical music and establishing the short independent institute 56 among his own achievements. In recent years, many comments have been made famous that did not coincide with the opinion of the government: he described the end of Népszabadság as an “extraordinary blow” to Hungarian press freedom, which “has no economic reasons”. In a poem, he laughed at the urged politicians at Fidesz, mentioning the “Laser-eyed Lazarus” and the helicopter Rogán Antal, and then he also spoke of how Orbán owed much to György Soros.



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