Born in Kassa, Hungary (now Košice, Slovakia), to a Hungarian noble family, Sándor Márai traveled to Frankfurt, Berlin, and Paris in his youth before settling in Budapest in 1928. The first person to write reviews of Franz Kafka, Márai gained prominence as a writer in Hungary through his realist style. His anti-fascist and anti-communist political leanings prompted him to leave Hungary in 1948. He lived in Italy and worked for Radio Free Europe before settling in San Diego in 1979, where he lived until committing suicide there in 1989.

Márai authored 46 books and won the Kossuth Prize. In the decade following his death, his work was rediscovered, and publishers began releasing his memoirs, plays, novels, and poems in English. His poems include “Funeral Oration,” which explores an exile who, after losing his home, may lose his native language and culture, and “Angel from Heaven (1956),” which depicts the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Notable books include The Rebels (1930, published in English in 2007), Portraits of a Marriage (1941, English 2011), and Embers (1942, English 2001). In a review of Portraits of a Marriage, Liesl Schillinger writes, “Each narrator begins by urgently, familiarly addressing an unknown person, then pouring out a story until every recess of memory has been emptied, interrupting the flow only to make sure the listener is still paying attention. …Through these linked soliloquies, Márai gives voice to a vanished world, in a chorus that is both eulogy and manifesto.”