Ladislas Dormandi

Biography Dormandi was born on 14 July 1898 in Dormánd, a village of the Austro-Hungarian Empire located since 1918 in Hungary. In 1924, he married the artist Olga Székely-Kovács (1900-1971) whose sister Alice Székely-Kovács (1898-1939) was a psychoanalyst and the first wife of Michael Balint. Dormandi's first novels were published in Hungary under the name László Dormándi. Between the two World Wars, he was also active as a translator and publisher, of for example Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig.

In 1938, the Dormandis fled Hungary and settled in Paris. During World War II, Dormandi worked for the clandestine publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit. After the war, he became a successful writer in French under the name Ladislas Dormandi. He was awarded the Cazes Prize in 1953 for his novel Pas si fou. Dormandi's and Olga Székely-Kovács' daughter Judith Dupont (1925–2025) was a well-known French psychoanalyst.