Lajos Zilahy
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Lajos Zilahy (March 27, 1891 − Dec. 1, 1974) was a Hungarian novelist and playwright. Born in Nagyszalonta (called Salonta in Romania) in Transylvania, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary, a province in Austria-Hungary, he studied law at the University of Budapest before serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, in which he was wounded on the Eastern Front - an experience which later informed his bestselling novel Two Prisoners (Két fogoly).
He was also active in film. His 1928 novel Something Is Drifting on the Water (Valamit visz a víz) was filmed twice. He wrote the 1943 screenplay himself and co-directed it with Gusztáv Oláh in Hungary under the international English title Something Is in the Water. The Czechoslovakian screeplay was written by Imre Gyöngyössy, Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos, and directed by the latter two with a Slovak, Hungarian, and Czech cast on location at the Danube in Slovakia under the title Desire Called Amada in Czech (Touha zvaná Amada, 1969) and Slovak (Túžba zvaná Amada), with Adrift as its English title.
Lajos Zilahy became the Secretary General of Hungarian PEN but his liberal views placed him at odds, first with the right-wing Horthy regime and later with the post-war Communist government. Zilahy left Hungary in 1947, spending the rest of his life in exile in the USA, where he completed A Dukay család, a trilogy of novels (Century in Scarlet, The Dukays, The Angry Angel) chronicling the history of a fictitious Hungarian aristocratic family from the Napoleonic era to the middle of the twentieth century. He died in Novi Sad, Serbia, then part of Yugoslavia.
