Agnes Walder was born in Budapest Hungary in 1943. She was 20 months old in 1945, when her father, the poet, Dr Lajos Walder, was killed in the Holocaust.
She was a teenager, during the Hungarian uprising of November 1956, when she walked with her mother, step-father, brother and two sisters across the border into Austria. The family arrived in Sydney in May 1957. At the time, she did not speak any English, but today considers this to be the strongest of her three languages, which include Hungarian and French.
She completed her secondary education at night school whilst supporting herself by doing secretarial work. Due to migrant circumstances her education was interrupted, but her need to organize the manuscripts of her father's literary works, and her own need to write were so strong that for nine years she attended university classes at night at the University of Southern Connecticut, USA (where she and her husband lived between 1964-68), and later at the University of Sydney, choosing courses for the purposes of personal study rather than towards a degree. Her two sons were born after their return to Australia.
From 1987 she worked closely with Hungarian publishers in Budapest, with the result that two separate posthumous publications of much of her father's works were published in Budapest, Hungary in 1989 and 1990. Since 1991, she has been translating her father's poems and plays from Hungarian into English. Her own major poem, My Life Among Westerners, was published by Macmillan Art Publishing in Melbourne in 2004. Agnes Walder lives with her family in Sydney Australia. [Source: Sydney Jewish Writers' Festival webpage at http://www.sjwf.org.au/the_writer.html]
