Árpád Göncz (10 February 1922 – 6 October 2015) was a Hungarian liberal politician, who served as President of Hungary from 2 May 1990 to 4 August 2000. Göncz played a role in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He was also founding member and Vice Chairman of Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ) and Speaker of the National Assembly of Hungary before becoming President.

He was a member of the international advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

He graduated in law from the Budapest Pázmány Péter University of Arts and Sciences in 1944. He also worked as a writer and has published several novels, plays and essays, and also translated a great number of prose works from English to Hungarian.

In the Second World War he was conscripted and ordered to Germany; however, he deserted and joined the resistance movement. In late-1944, Göncz found himself in Budapest when the Red Army encircled the Hungarian capital, beginning the Siege of Budapest.

After the war, in 1945 he joined the Independent Smallholders' Party and was the leader of the party's youth organization for Budapest as well as personal secretary to the general secretary. After the party was dissolved at the communist takeover, he worked as a manual labourer.

In the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 he worked in the newly recreated Hungarian Peasant Alliance. After the Soviet intervention on November 4, 1956, he participated in the writing of several memoranda and helped to transfer a manuscript of Imre Nagy abroad. He was arrested in May 1957 and sentenced to life imprisonment on August 2 of the same year, without the possibility of appeal. In 1960 he participated in the hunger strike of Vác. Along with more than 4,000 other revolutionaries and freedom fighters, he was released from prison under amnesty in 1963.

In the following decades, he worked as a specialized translator, translator of over a hundred literary works, and writer. Some of his notable translations include E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime and World's Fair, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River, William Faulkner's Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and A Fable, Ernest Hemingway's Islands in the Stream, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness and The Confessions of Nat Turner, John Ball's In the Heat of the Night, Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds, Yasunari Kawabata's The Lake, John Updike's Rabbit Redux and Rabbit is Rich, and The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, The Spire, The Pyramid and Rites of Passage by William Golding. His own works include both novels and dramas; Sarusok (1974), Magyar Médeia (1976), Rácsok (1979) and Találkozások (1980) are worth mentioning.

Political career and President of Hungary

He was a founding member of the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ) in 1988. In 1989 became President of the Hungarian Human Rights League. From 1989 to 1990 he was President and later Honorary President of the Hungarian Writers' Association. In May 1990 he was elected Member of Parliament. Göncz served as Speaker of the National Assembly of Hungary between May and August 1990. Under the Constitution, this also made him provisional president of Hungary. On August 4, he was elected for a full term as president by the National Assembly. He thus became Hungary's second freely elected head of state, and the first in 42 years who had no past ties to Communism. He was reelected in 1995 for another five-year term which he completed on August 4, 2000.

In 2000, he was honored with the Vision for Europe Award for his efforts in creating a unified Europe. In these periods he was very well received by the public, as he succeeded to remain free from politics, which helped him gain a wide acceptance.

Personal life

He married to Mária Zsuzsanna Göntér and had four children. Kinga Göncz, former foreign minister of Hungary, is his daughter.

Göncz died on 6 October 2015, at the age of 93.

Awards and honours

• 1991:  Italy – Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
• 1994:  Poland – Order of the White Eagle (1994)
• 1995:  Malta – Honorary Companion of Honour with Collar of the National Order of Merit (09.02.95[5]
• 1999 :  Lithuania – Grand Cross of the Order of Vytautas the Great (May 19, 1999)[6]
• 2000:  Germany – Special Class of the Grand Cross of the Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• 2000:  Slovakia – Grand Cross (or 1st Class) of the Order of the White Double Cross (2000)[7]
• 2003: Award of the Budapest Corvinus Europe Institute
• 2009: International Adalbert Prize for Peace, Freedom and Cooperation in Europe of Adalbert Foundation Krefeld
•  Czech Republic : Order of the White Lion
•  Estonia : Collar of the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana
•  Norway : Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav