"Ursus" G. Szohner was a painter whose one novel The Immigrant (Intermedia, 1977) is about a man who is forced to leave his native Hungary to seek a new life as a sawmill worker in an unnamed B.C. interior town from July to Christmas. With a sensitive interior but a rough exterior, the immigrant/narrator is drawn to a reckless and secretive affair with his married landlady, Kitty. Immature, hateful and haunted by flashbacks to domestic and social turmoil that occurred during Hungary's revolution, he loses Kitty and drunkenly considers his immigrant's plight in the snow outside a church on Christmas Eve. Szohner published stories in Hungarian-Canadian newspapers and gained a Canada Council grant with the sponsorship of Margaret Atwood, P.K. Page and James Reaney. He began painting in 1981 and produced several hundred large canvases, some of which were exhibited in Vancouver, Ottawa, Hamilton, and New York. Szohner was unable to find a publisher for a fiction manuscript entitled The Anti-Semite.

DATE OF BIRTH: 1936

PLACE OF BIRTH: Budapest, Hungary

ARRIVAL IN CANADA: 1957

EMPLOYMENT OTHER THAN WRITING: artist

[BCBW 2004] "Hungarian" "Fiction"