Tibor Fischer (born 15 November 1959) is a British novelist and short-story writer. In 1993, he was selected by the literary magazine Granta as one of the 20 best young British writers, while his novel Under the Frog was featured on the Booker Prize shortlist.
Fischer's parents were Hungarian basketball players, who fled Hungary in 1956; first his father, György Fischer, and then his mother, the captain of the women's national basketball team. Tibor's father studied economicsatManchester University,[1] started work in the Hungarian section of the BBC, taking the name "George Fischer", and ended up as Radio Four's head of talks and documentaries.[2]
The 1956 revolution, and his father's background, informed Fischer's debut novelUnder the Frog, about a Hungarian basketball team in the first years of Communism in Hungary. The title is derived from a Hungarian saying, that the worst possible place to be is "under a frog's arse down a coal mine."[4]
In 1992, the novel won a Betty Trask Prize for literature, and was the first debut novel to be shortlisted for the Booker prize.[3]
Good to be God was published by Alma Books on 4 September 2008. In it a broke, unemployed, "habitual failure" uses his friend's credit card to start a new life in Florida where he decides that the fastest way to make a fortune would be to start a religion.[4]
In 2000, Fischer published a short-story collection entitled Don't Read This Book If You're Stupid, published in the U.S. as I Like Being Killed: Stories.
In April 2017, Fischer wrote an opinion pieceinThe Guardian where he defended Hungarian prime ministerViktor Orbán's government against charges of authoritarianism and antisemitism.[7] In the same context, he rejected notions of the government going after the George Soros funded Central European University, arguing that the relevant and controversial amendment to the law on higher education affects some 28 foreign institutions, 27 of which were found to be operating with "irregularities" ("largely sloppy paperwork, something that will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with university admin") and that none has been fined or shut down. Fischer posits that the CEU "is not being singled out for punishment" but "asking to be given privileged treatment."[7]
In response to it, the newspaper received letters from CEU president Michael Ignatieff, Brian J. Dooley, of Human Rights First, and others, who expressed their opposition to Fischer's views,[8] arguing that the amendment requires the operation of a campus in CEU's country of origin, something that "would effectively make it impossible for CEU to operate in Hungary", and denying that the university has sought "special privileges".[8]
