- Can we speak Hungarian?

- Of course, though I might reply in German sometimes.

- How present was Hungarian culture in your family?

- Our Hungarian origin determined our home environment. I spoke only Hungarian with my parents. They can't even read German, so they are very much looking forward to a Hungarian translation of my book.

- So are you a Hungarian writer then?

- No, I'm simply a writer.

- But Hungarians can be proud of Melinda Nadj Abonjira, can't they?

- I wouldn't want to bind myself to any one nation. Throughout my life I have had ties with many different countries but as a writer I am not bound to define myself as part of any one nation. It's not important for me and anyway I live in a cosmopolitan environment.

- Wasn't it a Hungarian author who won the prize in Frankfurt?

- I would rather say that an author won the prize who loves the Hungarian language and Hungarian culture. I love Attila József and Ottó Tolnai, and Hungarian music, which I also play - but I don't want anything to do with any kind of nationalism or to get embroiled in Hungarian politics. I can understand if Hungarians are proud of me but I wouldn't attach a great deal of significance to it.  

- But still, you said thank you for your prize by singing a Hungarian folk song.

- I was even surprised that I was nominated in the first place. When I found out that I had been awarded the prize this song just popped into my head.

- Although you write in German, one can tell that you don't think just in German. Most critics have noted that you use unusual turns of phrase. So does Hungarian have an influence?  

- Yes, it does. My Hungarian is there in my German too. My Hungarian thinking lends a peculiar resonance to my German sentences. Hungarian is a very compact language. You can express subtle emotions very precisely with it. I try to experiment with this in German too. That's why my German is more vigorous than readers are used to. Germans can't put their finger on what it is but they feel that my writing has its own compactness. 

- Are you sorry that you can't write in Hungarian?

- I do write in Hungarian too, but unfortunately not without mistakes, that's why I prefer to present my work orally. At a lot of my readings I have mixed spoken Hungarian with music. When it comes to writing I prefer and am better in German. I wouldn't like to change this but Hungarian helps me to bring a different resonance, music and rhythm to the German language.  

- Any concrete examples?

- Hungarian makes a distinction between love and affection but German only has one concept: Liebe. If I come across this kind of thing, I try to make up a new German word in order to express the duel nature of Hungarian. Another example: I chose a Hungarian saying for the title of one of my short stories: Aus einem Hund wird kein Speck, i.e. bacon cannot be made from a dog. This saying doesn't exist in German so it's interesting to see how Germans interpret this title. After all, this is a very compact poetic image so it must mean something for Germans too. Hungarian sayings are poetic and somewhat vulgar at the same time. So I like to make German more colourful by using sayings taken from Hungarian. I inject a bit of wildness into German.

- Your novel is about an immigrant family from the Balkans and one often gets the feeling that the work reinforces clichés rather too much; for example, toothless people who speak German badly. Don't you think that such simple stereotypes could harm rather than help immigrants? 

- That's not the case. One of the characters in the book, Ildikó, a Vojvodian immigrant, falls in love with Dalibor because, although he has bad teeth, he stills laughs a lot. The book is an experiment in reinterpreting old-established clichés. In the case of the immigrants it's not important whether they have bad teeth or not, but whether we see their teeth at all. We see them because they can still laugh. The Swiss may have good teeth but they still don't smile as much. So if you start to become interested in your teeth and stop smiling - well you've arrived in Switzerland. It's therefore not a human smile that is repellent but rather stiff perfection.    

- In one scene in the book the toilet in the family's restaurant is smeared with excrement, presumably by xenophobic Swiss. Now that the racist Swiss People's Party is the biggest party in the country this scene takes on a special topicality. Did you also intend your book to be a political message?

- A writer is part of the times and shares society's problems. Every author puts their feelings into their works and of course politics gets mixed up in this like anything else. I am a part of Swiss society and I live with the Swiss, so I try to argue for my position. In this sense I think along political lines and I have for a long time been aware of the damaging processes which started a while ago in Switzerland but which have only recently culminated. However, using literature to send out concrete political messages is far from what I want. 

- And do the Swiss perceive the hidden political content?

- One Swiss critic wrote that my novel reveals more about the problems of immigrants than a sociological study. This interpretation of my novel was included in the jury statement of the Frankfurt award.

- Looking for a moment at the recent xenophobic and anti-Islam referenda, it is as if Switzerland was producing a clear example of how liberal laws of freedom can be demolished in a democracy if the majority wishes it so. Is democracy the dictatorship of the majority?

- Something like that. But of course Swiss referenda are not always so democratic. The Swiss People's Party threw several hundred million Swiss franks into the referendum campaign. Where did all that money come from? Because, unfortunately, it's money that decides things. It has often been in the interests of the rich for poorer sections of society to be at each other's throats. For example, the Swiss People's Party doesn't just campaign against foreigners but against the heavy taxes imposed on the rich.   

- What's the solution?

- I'll immigrate to French Switzerland...

- Nice joke...

- It's only half a joke. In that part of Switzerland racist demagogy somehow never gets a majority.

- What could the reason be for that?

- In places where foreigners live, where people know them, they actually see foreigners and it's not possible to work up a fear of them. But in little villages where they have never seen a foreigner people can be instilled with fear. It's never people who know foreigners that hate them but those who have never met any.

- Do you follow Hungarian politics?

- Not much. I don't like to state my views about things that I have no direct experience of. The picture of things from an external observer is always distorted. For example, at the moment the western media is writing a lot of bad things about the Hungarian situation but you don't necessarily have to believe the western media. 

- The Süddeutsche Zeitung recently envisioned Hungary as a dictatorship.

- Yes, but maybe a Swiss ‘dictatorship' would be a more interesting topic....A lot of western journalists want to show nationalism as an East European problem, but it is a Europe-wide phenomenon.  

- Maybe the West would like to free itself from the burden.

- You only have to look at western states. From the Dutch to the French, from the Germans to the Italians the extreme right and xenophobia are on the rise. So it is very unfair to single out one country..... such as  Hungary.

- And what's the reason? The economic crisis?

- You can always blame things on a crisis and find scapegoats. For example, in Switzerland instead of probing into the responsibility of bankers, women who chose to wear headscarves have been blamed for everything. This is because they are easy to identify and it's easy to make people hate them. If they declare that the source of every problem is the religion of Islam, then it's easy to distract attention from the real issues of the financial crisis and declare the Muslim faith as the source of all evil.  

- But don't women donning the headscarf really present a danger to an enlightened Europe? 

- I don't perceive any such danger.

- Do you think that Swiss women living in villages cut-off in the mountains are any more modern?

- Of course they aren't, but all they care about is cooking and making cheese and they don't see anything of the world. Compared to them a Muslim girl from a big city is far more enlightened.