Petőcz has published around 25 books, including poems for adults and children, essays, fiction and reviews. He has received numerous literary prizes and awards for his work in literature, including the Lajos Kassák Literary Prize (1987) Robert Graves Prize for best Hungarian poem of the year (1990), the Attila József Prize by the cultural part of the Hungarian government as an official recognition of his work to date, and is currently a UNESCO-Aschberg Laureat.
“ANDRÁS PETŐCZ longs in his bones for the great love affair that will be Europe. I know no one as passionately European as my friend Andras, and I know no European poet as close in spirit to revolutionary Americans like Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg. Reading these poems, you feel free and alive. Poets from the Old World and the Americas find one another in the United States, where we discover a “melting pot” of identity that is not, after all, uniquely or even particularly American. Citizens of the remains of old empires (including the Soviet, Ottoman,
and Austro-Hungarian) and former occupied nations interact in New York, Chicago, and a small town in Iowa. unreconstructed heterosexual men encounter post-feminist women and fluid sexualities and genders; sarcasm strips away hypocrisy’s contradictions, revealing at the same time frustration and longing. Andras told me that in writing these poems he discovered his urge to write fiction, “making people up” with humor and layered ironies. I encounter the “rounded” complexities of a created, imagined world of believable and engrossing human beings with histories, schemes, and hopes. The book is great fun”. - GREG MILLER, poet, Mississippi State USA