Zsófia Bán

Zsófia Bán (born September 23, 1957) is a Hungarian writer, literary historian, essayist and art and literature critic.

Personal life Zsófia Bán was born on September 23, 1957, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as the child of Jewish parents. She grew up there, and in 1969, she and her family returned to Hungary where she studied English language and Literature as well as Romance Studies in Budapest (1976–1981), Lisbon, Minneapolis and New Brunswick. She has worked in film studios, curated art exhibitions, was a fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and at the John-F.-Kennedy-Institut in Berlin, a Fulbright Fellow at Harvard University, as well as a writer-in-residence in Zug, Switzerland, among other residencies. From August 2015 to July 2016 Bán was a writer-in-residence at the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Artists-in-Berlin Program. In December 2024 she was chosen as a member of the Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Arts.

She lives and works in Budapest, where she was an associate professor of American Studies at the School of English and American Studies of the Faculty of Humanities of the Eötvös Loránd University. She is now a freelance writer.

Writing Zsófia Bán's writing often addresses topics related to visuality, visual arts, photography, personal and cultural memory, historical trauma, as well as gender. She has written a number of essays related to the topic of literature and visuality, including those on W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, Imre Kertész and Péter Nádas. Her short stories and essays have been widely anthologized, and translated to a number of languages, including German, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Slovak and Slovene.