Monica Porter

Monica Porter (born Mónika Halász) is a London-based journalist who, in both articles and books, has often written about her Hungarian émigré family background. She has to some extent specialised in first-person writing, covering a wide range of human relationship issues about which she is characteristically honest and outspoken.Monica Porter - Biography Porter was born in Budapest, Hungary. Her father was the writer and journalist Péter Halász and her mother was singer Vali Racz. Her family fled from Hungary, along with some 200,000 others, in November 1956, when the Hungarian Revolution was suppressed by the Soviet Union. The Halasz family escaped via Austria and emigrated to the United States. Monica Porter grew up first in the Bronx, New York City, and later in the suburb of Hartsdale, where she attended Woodlands High School. In 1970 she moved to London, England, in order to study acting at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. She only stayed for one year, however, and on leaving began to write. Her first published articles appeared in the weekly newspaper, The Stage. From 1974 to 1978 she worked as a staff writer on the Local Government Chronicle. In the early 1970s she also broadcast regularly for the Hungarian section of Radio Free Europe. Much later, in the early 1990s, she made a series of Personal View broadcasts for the English-language BBC World Service.